The President's lies about why employment growth is so anemic
President Obama has earned quite the reputation for blaming his problems on the actions and policies of others. There is always someone to point the finger at as being the guilty party - the scapegoat.
He actually has a history of doing so. In 2008, he continually blamed "staffers" for mistakes that he had made. ABC news Jake Tapper (an honest journalist) mocked him for using that tactic in "Obama's Inability to Hire Good Help Rears Its Head...Again."
He blames Fat Cats , Wall Street, Greedy Doctors, Stupid Cops,for his litany of problems. Then there is his Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder where he blames economic problems on George Bush.
Now a new scapegoat has emerged for pitiful job numbers: Mother Nature---and , once again, he has been caught in The Big Lie.
Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal catches this one:
Austan Goolsbee, the president's top economic adviser, used the Sunday morning platforms to argue that the "variable" jobs numbers were "bumps on the road to recovery." Pro-administration analysts, including Mr. Obama himself, argued that the economy was battling tough but temporary "headwinds" such as Asian tsunamis or Midwest tornadoes that disrupt supply chains. In defense of the integrity of the government's data gatherers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put out a statement that "We found no clear impact of the disasters on the national employment and unemployment data for May."
Oops - had he had more time I am sure he would have blamed the bad weather on global warming - and Republicans.
We will be hearing a lot more talking and a lot more lying as we head towards November, 2012.
We recently have seem a prime example of how Barack Obama will package a lot of lies, exaggerations, distortions and deceptions in one short speech - the one touting the success of the auto industry bailout (which he claimed was his own when, in reality, the first step to bailout GM and Chrysler was undertaken by George Bush).
Glenn Kessler makes hash out of that tissue of lies in his Washington Post column, "President Obama's phony accounting on the auto industry bailout" where he wrote:
With some of the economic indicators looking a bit dicey, President Obama traveled to Ohio last week to tout what the administration considers a good-news story: the rescue of the domestic automobile industry. In fact, he also made it the subject of his weekly radio address.
We take no view on whether the administration's efforts on behalf of the automobile industry were a good or bad thing; that's a matter for the editorial pages and eventually the historians. But we are interested in the facts the president cited to make his case.
What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech. Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.
Will journalist have the same integrity and character as Jake Tapper, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Glenn Kessler in the months to come?