Let us count the ways: bald lies, lies of omission, mythography, amnesia, redaction . . .
We can usefully view the Obama administration’s chronic untruthfulness as a sort of multifaceted corporation of untruth, with all sorts of subsidiaries.
THE BALD LIES OF POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY
Remember the al-Qaeda-is-on-the-run 2012-election talking point? It was mostly a lie. The administration deliberately released to sympathetic journalists only those documents from the so-called Osama bin Laden trove that revealed worry and dissension among the terrorists. Then it nourished essays by pet journalists trumpeting the decline of al-Qaeda. Disturbing memos that confounded that narrative, as Weekly Standard journalist Steven F. Hayes recently noted, were kept back. “On the run” was dropped after the 2012 election, when events on the ground made such an assertion absurd.
Recent disclosures by some of the combatants about the night of the Benghazi attack remind us that almost everything Jay Carney, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and President Obama swore in the aftermath of the debacle was knowingly false. A video did not cause the attack. The rioting was not spontaneous. A video-maker, an American resident, was soon jailed, while one of the suspected killers was giving taped interviews at a coffee house in Benghazi. There were ways of securing the consulate and the annex that were not explored, both before and during the assault. Talking points were altered. Again, the catalyst for untruth was reelection worries by an administration that believes its exalted ends of social justice allow any means necessary for reaching them.
Has anything the administration said about pulling our troops out of Iraq proven true? Was it really the Iraqis’ fault or George Bush’s? Was our leaving proof that Iraq might be one of the administration’s “great achievements”? Was the Iraq that we left without any peacekeepers really “stable”? On more than ten occasions the president bragged on the campaign trail that he alone had ended American involvement in Iraq. When Iraq predictably blew up after our departure, he snarled to reporters that he was angry that anyone would dare accuse him alone of being responsible for our precipitate departure.
Was there any element of “reset” with Russia that was accurate? Obama came into office lambasting the prior administration for alienating Russia — when all it had done was adopt some rather moderate measures to punish Russia for invading Georgia. Reset, in truth, was a remission of punishments — from missile defense with the Czechs and Poles to cut-offs of some high-level negotiations — and thus served as a signal to Putin and his subordinates that Obama believed America had been wrong to react to Georgia. And we know what followed from that.
LIES TO HIDE WHAT WE DON’T LIKE
On issues where the public is at odds with the administration, the Obama team too often makes things up to hide its isolation. Little the administration has stated about the IRS scandal has proven true. It was not a slip-up in one local office; nor were liberal groups equally targeted. There was quite a bit more than a “smidgen” of corruption. The administration’s strategy was to make so many things up that the public got confused and the matter went away. The corruption worked to defang the Tea Party in 2012, and the cover-up — except for fall woman Lois Lerner, who took the Fifth Amendment — worked even better.
Have any of the statements the administration has presented about our southern border proven true? Do we know how many people have recently crossed into the United States illegally, what exactly U.S. immigration policy is, or where exactly foreign nationals are and what are their statuses? The public polls strongly against lax borders and blanket amnesties, so the administration apparently must deceive to permit both — and in a politically disingenuous fashion of postponing the requisite executive orders until after the 2014 midterm elections, while blaming the delay on the crisis on the border that it caused.
Did much of anything prove accurate about the Affordable Care Act? Costs, keeping our doctors and existing plans, the effect on the deficit, the website? Had the president in 2008 outlined honestly the ACA’s provisions, he would never have gotten elected, or had he by 2012 fully implemented them, he would never have gotten reelected. Lying about Obamacare and demonizing any who objected were smart politics, but the president will never regain the trust of those whose premiums spiked, who lost their coverage and their doctors, and who still do not understand what exactly Obamacare is.
MYTHOGRAPHY
Most of the assertions uttered in the 2009 Cairo speech were untrue, from false claims about Islamic achievement to supposed Islamic tolerance during the Inquisition in Córdoba — at a time when there were no Muslims in Córdoba. Emperor Hirohito no more surrendered to General Douglas MacArthur than George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR were in office when their respective wars ended and they supposedly agreed to prisoner exchanges — or than Barack Obama’s grandfather helped to free Auschwitz. Obama sees history in the same postmodernist fashion in which he looks upon his own past — details are constructed by everyone, and thus truth is a relative concept that should not be adjudicated by those with privilege against those who are using narratives to advance social justice. The result is that almost any time the president makes reference to the past, ours or his, we can assume two things: His facts are wrong, and they are wrong in a way that is meant to highlight his own godhead.
AMNESIA
There are lots of things that Obama says that he knows will simply fade into oblivion. Did we ever believe that Joe Biden was going to bird-dog abuses in spending for the stimulus to ensure shovel-ready jobs? Did we really believe that Obama would halve the deficit by the end of his first term — or that he would close Guantanamo Bay? Did he really obtain congressional approval for bombing Libya, as he once promised for such operations? Did anyone believe that the Obama administration would not hire former lobbyists or that it would end the revolving door, any more than we believed Obama’s assurances that those who made less than $250,000 would not have any of their taxes go up? What exactly is an Obama step-over line, red line, or deadline? Obama’s serial rhetorical emphatics — Let me be perfectly clear, Make no mistake about it, In point of fact, You can take that to the bank, I’m not kidding, I’m not making this up — are the usual verbal tics that warn the audience that a complete untruth is to follow.
SCAPEGOATING
Then there is another sort of untruth summed up best as blame-gaming — “They did it, not me!” The president confessed to having no strategy to deal with the Islamic State. But that was the fault of the Pentagon for not yet formulating any. The Islamic State had crept up on us — and that was the fault of the intelligence services. The world is in chaos? The new social networking — the much-bragged-about hip keystone of Obama’s two election campaigns — is to blame for making the gullible believe the world is falling apart. The president had to remove every last soldier from Iraq — but he didn’t really do that; it was either Bush or Maliki. The president ignored his own red lines in Syria? But they weren’t his own: The U.N., not he, made them. The president dubbed the Islamic State the jayvees? No, he actually meant an array of groups.
Such blame-gaming is simply the current foreign-policy manifestation of a long-established Obama-administration trait of blaming dismal news on something other than its own policies: ATMs were responsible for high joblessness; the stimulus failed, but House obstructionism was to blame. The Republican House also blocked immigration reform — which Obama easily could have passed when the Democrats controlled the Congress in 2009–10. Tsunamis and earthquakes, including a mild tremor in D.C. itself, rattled the economy and contributed to the discouraging economic statistics. Bad GDP news? The American people had gotten a bit “soft” and lost “their competitive edge.”
REDACTED
Sometimes there are lies by omission. The administration is simply incapable of uttering the phrases “radical Islam” or “Islamic terrorism,” and that fact requires all sorts of lying by omission about who exactly is killing Americans and why. So we are serially told that the Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular, that workplace violence caused Fort Hood, that jihad is largely a personal journey, that the idea of terrorists creating a caliphate is absurd, and all the other euphemisms necessary to hide the apparently unpleasant truth of killing by radical Islamists.
As far as the VA, AP, IRS, NSA, and other scandals go, do not count on any confession, investigation, lawsuit, or special prosecutor to reveal the truth in the next two years. The Obama administration will lose documents, redact critical information, find e-mails only years later, and lie about evidence until most of its members are safely out of office and working for Citigroup, one of the major TV networks, or Goldman Sachs.
Obama’s prevaricating has lost him any thought of a legacy, all the more so because for years as a candidate and as president he pontificated about his new transparency and the need for executive candor — itself an untruth at best, and at worst a cynical ploy to provide cover for a deliberate effort to enact policies that could not be honestly presented to the American people.
The two fuels that run Untruth, Inc., are, first, a realization that most of the president’s policies, whether deliberately or as a result of indifference and laziness, run counter to what most Americans support, and, second, a media establishment so invested in his agenda that it will not call the administration to account. So the engine of lying keeps humming. On any given day the president of the United States can step up to the teleprompter amid the latest disaster and swear that he did not do what he just did, or insist that someone else, not he, did the dastardly deed, or simply skip over recent history and make things up. The press at first quibbles, then nods in agreement, and Obama is empowered to do it again and again. We have not seen such a disingenuous president since Richard Nixon — but he, at least, was countered rather than enabled by the media.
Well, sounds like you know it all, have all the things the President does (or not do) all figured out (down to facial twitches to determine when he’s lying), completely exposed the gullibility of the media, are completely well-versed in all the secrets of the Administration so that you know all the facts of everything. I’m impressed. Perhaps YOU should run in 2016.
Look, I am not jumping on the Obama bandwagon here, but what scares me a bit is that some author, like yourself, who does seem to command some level of readership interest and credibility, can just spew out this kind of information and make no citations regarding how you arrived at your conclusions. This kind of mumbo-jumbo only serves to feed the ill-informed conspiracy theory masses that base their accusations on the prevailing winds of fear of federal authority. Most of us poor ill-informed slobs only get our news from the media you suggest is on Obama’s side. If you have some secret insider knowledge or have a copy of America’s Book of Secrets that reveals the REAL story of everything in history ever done or contemplated by an American president, please share. Otherwise everything you’ve just written here has value only to those readers who are easily swayed by accusations without corroborative substance.
Shut up ! Fool.
Doug,
All one needs to do is to compare “then and now” videos showing doublespeak from the White House.
More recently the revelation on Fox news that the administration was pressuring Jennifer Griffin from disclosing that the Benghazi attacks were actually well coordinated and planned attacks. And not due to a six-month-old video as the administration claimed for two weeks.
This was clearly an administration political ploy to advance the theory that Al Qaeda was on the run and bin Laden was dead.
In short I am sure that Victor Davis Hanson and provide as many links and references as you need to support his assertions.
We would be lucky to have a man like him in any administration whether as president or adviser.
It’s not mumbo jumbo, Doug. You are on the Obama bandwagon, and a fool if you keep believing this administration’s lies. Keep voting Democrat loser, we don’t want you on our side.
Some citations:
water is wet,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water
the sun is hot,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun
hey Doug check out my rebuttal to yours below. He has posted articles on these subjects before with citations. This is a summary of all the Obama lies, he has written separate articles with the citations for news sources. Ok a couple of news sources for you, “Drudge report”, Brietbart.com., or just google VA, AP, IRS, NSA scandal. It is not difficult to look up and where do you get this “Americas book of Secrets”. Your own delusional invention????????? Your post also smacks of intellectual arrogance, your lack of rebuttal skills proves your not that smart, so don’t even try.
doug, dont know what your are smoking but quit it. or either you are on obama’s pr committee. if you are reading hanson you know who he is and what he writes. he is spot on. where have you been? the data on liberal media bias is all over the place. so are obama’s faux-pas. perhaps before reading another of vdh’s columns you need to brush up on reality and truth about our potus and the main stream media. the book of secrets is in front of your face but you wont find them where you are looking now.
Doug, who admits that he is unfamiliar with the great VDH and is therefore a first time poster here, took the time to upload a picture of himself with his glasses at the end of his nose so that we can all understand how intelligent and worldly he is. Thanks, Doug!
Doug, I’d be deliriously happy to have a man with the intelligence, candor and integrity of Victor Davis Hanson as our president. But there are too many people like you who don’t value those things and would refuse to vote for him, or a person like him. A better question is what have you been neglecting to read to think any of the items in this article are even in question?
well said, Mickey
You are forgetting Clinton, he could lie himself out of essentially anything, and his only saving grace is he was not philosophically fettered to any one thing, which allowed him to sway with the polls and tradewinds of political discourse. Obama does not have this second attribute, as he is in fact the antithesis of negotiability.
You will notice with Democrats most of the major news networks will wait for another smaller news network or organization to do the investigating and news breaking, and then will jump on the cart, after it has been built, loaded and horsed. This allows them to hedge their bets and continue their narratives in the mean time.
clinton was and is burl ives playing big daddy in cat on a hot tin roof. difference is mendacity does not bother clinton.
the American people are getting what they deserve, and have taken his actions and incorporated it into our our national identity, and as an example of what we have become. Lies are important only if you get caught, denying any responsibility for one’s actions, avoid any punishment if you have a good lawyer, we are victims of those around us, our honor(if we have any) , ours souls, our beliefs, can be bought and paid for if enough money is there, someone else should make sacrifices for us, our celebrity worship, we forgive, unless there is money in it for us. The false belief in a mirage in what we think we are or have become.
goofy american television paved the way for clinton. americans have been amused to death, dazed and confused by the unreality and deconstruction of american values and culture by the writers and actors. “not that there is anything wrong with that.”
Doug,
Is this the only column that you have access to about the DC liars and cheaters club?
All Mr. Hanson does is comment on stuff we already know. It’s nice to know there is intelligence out there that isn’t enamored of Obama
The problem is that many people only see the stuff that Obama approves of through media He controls. (I use a capital H to refer to Obama because many, including B. Walters, thought he was the next messiah.) And even if those people hear something contrary they have been told it’s because the person is racist.
The media which you think is supposedly not kowtowing to Obama showed a video of Obama showing up personally to let them know he was not pleased with their coverage of him. Impressive and scary to say the least. They choose their words carefully now. Have you ever heard of Doublespeak? What is sad is that Walters makes excuses for why Obama, their messiah, seems to have failed them.
Anyone can read your comments and see that you don’t have to jump onto the O bandwagon. You have been riding in His wagon all along. How does the koolaid taste? Someday I hope his koolaid leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
Thomas,
Good one.
Short and sweet!
You made me laugh.
IMO, the current administration is the most deceptive in my lifetime, which spans from FDR’s last term to now.
dont forget the main stream media.
Does anyone remember the time when O was running for office that he had his followers report anyone who said bad stuff about him? Chicago politics? Threaten those in opposition? Creepy!
He also wanted his followers to get in their faces and yell at them. Still used by Dems. There is no discussion, Dems are right and you are NOT.
Nothing but lies and more lies from this administration. Yet there are so many stupid people in this country who keep believing the lies…it’s frustrating to the max. Hardly anyone keeps up with the news and what is going on in the world, they just keep watching their propaganda tv shows and kids are being indoctornated in schools nation wide.
Doug, have you been paying attention to the news. All what Mr. Hanson has written can be verified, your words such as “Mumbo Jumbo, fear of federal Authority ” only serves as personal attacks and painting Victor as some sort of conspiracy theorist, rather than rebuttal of his post. Point is you cannot Rebut anything that Mr. Hanson has so carefully documented. Anyone that follows the news and has truly an unbiased point of view will Understand what a disaster this administration has been to this Country and the World. One Point, lets take fear of federal authority, damn right we should fear Federal Authority here is a link to the Wall street Journal about the raid on gibson Guitar Company. This is one of many such abuses of power, here is the link.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424053111903895904576542942027859286
If you were not so lazy or just a left wing indoctrinated drone you would look up the abuses Mr. Hansen discuses in his post.
Doug, rebuttal? [Crickets Chirping]
People like Doug irritate me because, not only is everything VDH said true, but also able to be corroborated by the facts: written, video, historical, and through rational appraisal. It is either duplicitous denial of reality to serve their own interests and beliefs, or a complete failure to recognize reality. It’s people like Doug who allow mass murder’s like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao to seize control of entitle societies by propagating the ‘Big Lie” that confuses populations into accepting demagogues that in turn destroy their societies. Because, that is exactly what Barack Hussein Obama is doing, destroying the United States of America; and people like Doug, who either reject the seriousness of the opposition’s accusations, support Obama, or scapegoat his actions for perceived greater good, are just as guilty as he in this debacle.
Victor Davis Hanson deserves the surname “Martel” For HAMMERing the Mohammedan poseur in the White House as did his namesake, Charles, at Tours (or Poitiers) in 732. Unfortunately for this day Mr Hanson couldn’t HAMMER this Mohammedan in the same fashion as Charles Martel HAMMERED the Mohammedans of his day…bloodily back over the Pyrenees to the Iberian Peninsula…dragging their tails behind them.
Doug,
Please read what VDH has written…as a military historian his The Savior Generals is a good start.
And to the right of this article are all the categories he’s written about over a period of years. This article unlike many wasn’t hyperlinked to any particular word or phrase, but others are linked.
Take care of yourself.
Gotta admit… you guys are pretty good at this “rebutt” thing. I’m serious; not sarcastic. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about Mr. Hanson to worship the ground he walks on as you all seem to do… so you have me at a disadvantage. This is obviously his courtroom and I should hold reverence to what he says, I suppose. Contrary to a couple of you who somehow surmised I was a “democratic drone” of some sort, I did not deny what Mr. Hanson wrote, but rather I try and search for balanced tidbits in which to formulate my own opinions.. rather than simply accept what’s being tossed at me (like FOX tries to do). I’ve been a liberal conservative all my life and I gotta say… the problem here is not Obama. Like it or not, we got him until the next election, so let’s quit worrying about what he has or hasn’t done according to how we think he should be doing it and focus on the person who is going to replace the democrats in 2016. The Republican party is a damned, ill-focused mess and there is no one right now with the public collateral clout to organize the republican chaos to beat Hillary (unless she herself screws up somehow in the future). Now, I know that remark is going to invite a litany of replies from people who claim to have the political pulse of the nation and dredge up names of those who should run, and could, and might, and maybe… yada yada. Ok.. here’s my opinion you can debate. It’s very obvious the next ten years we will be muddling through this Islamic extremist threat and trying to settle down all the tribal nonsense in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. So let’s try and find a republican who can deal with that kind of thing.
Doug, for once can’t one of you kool-aid cultists own your failure on this administration instead of concern-trolling over footnotes and posing as some kind of independent ?
You’re obviously on the bandwagon – why bother lying about it. Hanson could have written this piece about your comment – it’s all fakery and denial.
There are stacks of books documenting what Hanson’s saying here along with hundreds of articles and posts written every day this garbage has been going on since you first voted in the Light Worker. Hanson’s written hundreds of pages here and elsewhere and given hours of interviews.
You act as if you just decided to start looking into this Obama guy today and are disappointed that VDH didn’t provide you with a nice Voxsplaining card treatment, Wikipedia-length with a few footnotes.
BS. You know you voted twice for a fraud, a poseur and a failure who’s hostile to American values and has no clue of what being a President entails. Own it, Doug. You and every other navel-gazing Boomer spawn who voted for this guy because he’s just like all of you – a dishonest, shallow man-child playacting at life while Rome burns, with no clue of what to do other than strike fake poses, talk out of both sides of your mouth and congratulate each other on your alleged superiority..
Why don’t we ignore Doug. Like Obama, he is here to confuse by conflation and obfuscation. “The problem is not Obama”, he writes. Please, Doug wants us to ignore the narcissistic, egomaniac in the WH, the man holding the most powerful office in history of the world, and move on to the next problem! This is the typical modus operandi of Obama’s drones. “Nothing to be seen here. Move along.”, they chant.
IGNORE Doug and his ilk. Don’t waste your precious time and intellectual capital on him. That is what he wants. You can’t debate with a doorknob. The man is a quarter-wit (a half-wit to a half-wit).
Uh, well.. ok. Let’s pick up where Mr. Marcus prefers to go. Obama is the bane of humanity’s existence; the purveyor of lies, the prognosticator of deception, the king of all that ills the world today. Just what do you want to spend your energy (and likely taxpayer money) on doing about that? What can the average conservative hope to do.. or support… to curtail Obama’s alleged continued ineffectiveness? You prefer to embroil the country in some republican effort to impeach him for some reason or another.. right in the middle of all this Mid East turmoil? One might suggest such an effort at this time smacks of siding with ISIS in some attempt to divide and consume us with political misdirection. Obama may not be the best president for meeting this Mid East crisis and the ISIS threat but he is the only one at the moment running (or ruining?) the show. What option do YOU suggest.. or are you guys all just here to pat each other on your radical conservative backs and play debate/rebuttal games regarding things we cannot change until election time? What scares me a bit, Mr. Marcus, is that you actually think your last post directed at me was, on some level, your definition of intellectual capital. Oh.. by the way.. doorknobs can turn either way.. and open doors. The other option is to just leave it closed and put blinders on.
Doug, Blinders on! oh please, you like all the other Liberals with Blinders on learn nothing even when you are thoroughly pummeled in the arena of public debate. As for intellectual capital, you never had any in the first place to invest in. By the way you are very very very old news everyone has moved on.
Doug,
Never got to the end of your drivel. In fact, I didn’t finish the first sentence.
Ignored. Bye, Doug.
Yes, indeed. Here is some forthcoming Obama-truth: after the election this guy goes full OJ on us. High crimes, tyrannies, misdemeanors, max lies, max manipulations, seditions, treasons, subterfuges, etc. — an all-out assault on America and its institutions.
The first six years were only a warm-up for the last two year sprint to the “fundamental change” finish line.
You have been forewarned– not by me but by Obama himself.