The Patriot Post® · Obama's Tour of Lies

President Barack Obama is a liar. Not a person who “misspoke,” as the New York Times editorial board ridiculously asserted last Sunday. His promise that if Americans liked their healthcare plan they could keep it – made on at least  23 separate, videotaped occasions – was not the "half true" statement the equally corrupt politifact.com website contended it was. Nor did the president make a "campaign pledge which did not hold up to the realities of governing,“ as shameless TV host Bill Maher declared, before further noting it was a "moral complexity” he is “okay with ‘cause I’m not twelve.” It was a bald-faced lie. And on at least one occasion in June of 2009, it included a completely unambiguous qualifier: “if you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan, period.” (Italics mine). Yet Monday, in an Orwellian moment that provided the public with an unprecedented look at the president’s utter lack of credibility, Obama insisted he never made any such promises.

“What we said was you could keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law was passed,” Obama declared at the St. Regis hotel, in a room  containing around 200 of his staunchest Organizing for Action (OFA) supporters. He then went on defending the indefensible. "If we had allowed these old plans [to continue] … then we would have broken an even more important promise–making sure that Americans gain access to health care that doesn’t leave them one illness away from financial ruin,“ he remarked. "So the bottom line is, is that we are making the insurance market better for everybody.”

Note the use of the word “we.” “We” didn’t make the same promise to the American people over and over and over again. Barack Obama did. “We” is a great indication the president is more than willing to once again absolve himself of responsibility, should this transparent effort to literally re-write history fail to gain the support of the American public.

Thankfully, it is an effort being undermined by revelation after revelation. On Monday, the AP revealed at least 3.5 million Americans have had their insurance policies cancelled so far. “So far” is a critical phrase for a number of reasons. As AP notes, "data is unavailable in a (sic) half the states.“ Assuming the data is identical, getting the other half of it would theoretically double the cancellation total to 6 million.

Fortunately, an Obama administration talking point, or more accurately, a pathetic attempt to mitigate the damage regarding the president’s mendacity, inadvertently provided a far more accurate picture of how many Americans they expect will be losing their coverage. "We’re talking about 5 percent of the country," explained White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.

Five percent of the country equals 14 million people.

Yet even that number is pales in comparison to what Forbes Magazine’s Roy Avik discovered. He notes that page 34,551 of the Federal Register, Vol. 75, No. 116 – dated Thursday, June, 17, 2010 – reveals a great deal about what this administration knew and when they knew it. "In total, approximately 66 percent of small employers and 48 percent of large employers made a change in either cost sharing or premium contribution during 2009 that would require them to relinquish grandfather status if the same change were made in 2011,” it states. Avik reveals that the cancellations resulting from these subsequently non-grandfather plans in the employer-based market, coupled with the estimated losses in the individual market, raises the number of people who can’t keep their current plan if they like it up to a mind-boggling 93 million Americans.

That’s almost one third of the entire country.

Moreover, the notion that Barack Obama might have been “unaware” his promise was untruthful was exploded by the Wall Street Journal. They reveal that while the president was out making his pitch to the American people, White House officials “discussed whether that was a promise they could keep,” ultimately deciding “the assertion was fair.”

Their twisted rationale was best expressed by an unnamed former official. "You try to talk about health care in broad, intelligible points that cut through, and you inevitably lose some accuracy when you do that,“ the official said. Jim Margolis, a media adviser to Obama’s campaigns in 2008 and 2012, made a similar assessment. "With 20/20 hindsight, maybe this should have been parsed more carefully,” he contended. Nonetheless, he reached the same destination "The president’s statement seems fair,“ he decided.

Former senior White House advisor David Axelrod sunk even lower, claiming there was no intention to mislead the public, and that the failure of the healthcare.gov website is the real reason so many Americans are angry. "The great misfortune here is that the website debacle occurred at the same time as this issue arising,” he said. “Because, if the website hadn’t gone down, then lots of these people would be going online and figuring out, 'Hey I’m getting a better insurance policy, and I’ll have to pay less money for it.’ But they can’t, because the website is down.”

In other words, Americans would have been OK with being lied to, as long as they could have gotten cheaper insurance.

Administration officials buried themselves still deeper, insulting the public in the process. They told the Journal there was some second-guessing involved in reaching their decision, discussing the possibility that Obama “might use more in-depth discussions, such as media interviews, to explain the nuances of the succinct line in his stump speeches.” Yet they determined such details could “clutter” the president’s message, “confusing” Americans in the process. Some officials did object to the president’s assertions, but they were reportedly overruled by political aides.

In other words, they decided to lie by omission, because they believed Americans were too stupid to handle the truth. And once again, remaining true to form, the White House claims it never knew about the dissenters.

The Washington Post’s Mark Theissen, who worked in the Bush White House, reveals the utter nonsense behind such a claim. After explaining the “staffing process” that determines whether anything even remotely questionable can be included in a speech by the president, noting that every line “is reviewed by dozens of senior officials, who offer comments and factual corrections,” he reaches an inexorable conclusion. "This was an (sic) premeditated deception,“ he declares. "This wasn’t something Obama ad-libbed. It was a line in a presidential speech that was carefully reviewed by the entire White House senior staff. Obama’s political advisers were told by his policy aides the statement was inaccurate – but they decided to let Americans believe the falsehood.”

Like Obama himself, the president’s defenders are also engaged in Orwellian endeavors. "There was nothing about what President Obama or that I or any other Democrat supporting the Affordable Care Act said that was not true,“ declared DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz. (Wasserman Schultz herself is a documented liar, caught on videotape attributing a statement to Israeli ambassador Michael Oren she subsequently denied making). The best the Huffington Post’s Jason Linkins can do is take the president mildly to task for his "glib pronouncement,” even as he wonders “whether the media’s overarching attention to finding some cheap gotcha moments to bedevil political figures for a newscycle or three doesn’t end up adding to the confusion.” And while the National Journal’s Ron Fournier criticizes Obama for “misleading the public about his deception,” he subsequently concludes that on “history’s scale of deception, this one leaves a light footprint. Worse lies have been told by worse presidents, leading to more severe consequences, and you could argue that withholding a caveat is more a sin of omission.”

Since Fournier failed to identify any of those worse lies, one is left to ponder what particular “sin of omission” has resulted in more severe repercussions than the possibility of 97 million Americans losing their health insurance.

What one is not left to ponder is the depth to which the president and his apologists will sink to defend Obama’s outright lying, all of which can be reduced to the American left’s ultimate rationalization: we will get what we want by any means necessary. Thus they will furiously attempt to deflect reality, insisting that the president’s lie either doesn’t matter, or even worse, is justifiable because Americans can get cheaper insurance policies, they were being ripped off by what the left has taken upon itself to define as “lousy” insurance policies (even as they couldn’t care less what policy holders themselves think), or that Americans simply don’t know what’s best for themselves.

They will even go so far as to belittle a stage 4 cancer patient named Edie Littlefield Sundby, because she had the temerity to pen a Wall Street Journal editorial revealing that she is losing both her insurance and her oncology doctors because of ObamaCare. White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer used his official Twitter account to disseminate a blog by Think Progress blaming the woman’s insurance company for pulling out of the California market, rather than the reality that ObamaCare itself prompted the move.

Remarkably, Obama himself used market turnover as his rationale for contending he never lied to the American public. “People are acting like this is some new phenomenon… every year there was churn in this individual market,” he told his supporters Monday night. "We decided we need to build something better, no matter how hard it is.“

And no matter how much lying it takes to get there. It remains to be seen if this is the final straw for the American public. The latest Gallup poll shows Obama’s approval ratings have fallen below 40 percent. "Obama has rebranded himself as a liar, forever. He will carry this new label to his grave," writes the NY Post’s Kyle Smith. It is a new label that will be heavily reinforced by a critical mass of videotaped statements, none of which contain any mention of his new "if it hasn’t changed” qualifier – along with one cancelled policy after another, affecting millions.

Yet the true measure of this president comes down to one immutable reality. Faced with a choice of admitting he lied and apologizing to the public, or doubling down on thoroughly documented lie, he chose to double down. There’s only one reason he would do that: because he thinks he can get away with it. If he’s right, this nation truly has been “fundamentally transformed.”

Originally published at FrontPage Magazine.