Obama’s Untruth, Inc.
Let us count
the ways: bald lies, lies of omission, mythography,
amnesia, redaction . . .
By Victor Davis Hanson
NatonalReview.com
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.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.