September 7, 2012 by Chip Wood
UPI FILE
Who's really telling the lies?
Man, talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Flacks for President Barack Obama are going absolutely ballistic at Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, denouncing them as liars and implying they are thieves, felons and even murderers.
And then they have the nerve to accuse Romney and Ryan of running a dirty campaign!
What’s even more disgusting is how their lapdogs in the mainstream media faithfully repeat every new accusation — while never coming within a country mile of holding Obama or Vice President Joe Biden to the same standard. It’s almost enough to make you think you’ve stumbled into a Will McAvoy rant on “The Newsroom.”
I’ll get to all the fuss and fury about Ryan’s auto-plant remarks in a moment. But first let me ask you, what do you think has been Obama’s biggest lie since he took office nearly four years ago?
There sure has been a bunch to choose from. Some were ridiculous, or at least extremely unlikely, when he made them. I’ll put his promise to close the prison at Guantanamo in this category. Or to bring all the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Some were just plain impossible, such as his pledge that if Congress gave him $863 billion in stimulus spending, he would slash the Nation’s unemployment rate to 5.6 percent. He got every penny he asked for, and some extra goodies besides. Yet unemployment remains stuck above 8 percent. (If you add in the underemployed and people who are no longer counted because they’ve quit looking for work, the actual number is well over 15 percent.)
Or how about his promise, just after his election, to end the political rancor in this country? Remember when he said he would “heal the divides that have held back our progress”? That promise sure got tossed out the window when it came time for his re-election campaign, didn’t it? This one is shaping up to be one of the nastiest in memory.
Or how about the President’s promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term? Remember when he called George Bush’s deficits “obscene”? Barack Obama has run trillion-dollar-plus deficits every year since he took office, with no end in sight. He’s helped saddle our children, and our children’s children, with obligations they will never be able to repay.
I could go on and on, from his tax-the-rich schemes to his class warfare rhetoric. But of all the promises that Obama has broken, I think the biggest was the one he made when he was sworn in as President. I’m referring to his oath of office, in which he promised to “preserve, protect and defend” our Constitution.
I submit that had he kept that promise, none of the others would have mattered. In fact, most of them wouldn’t have been possible.
But of course the mainstream media never reminds you of any of Obama’s misstatements. And they all but ignore Biden’s numerous gaffes. Can you imagine what they’d do if any Republican said anything close to Biden’s “put you back in chains” comment? Well, actually, you don’t have to imagine; just check out what they did to Todd Akin for his “legitimate rape” comment.
Now, Ryan is catching a lot of flack for his speech last week at the Republican National Convention, especially his comments about a shuttered GM plant in his hometown of Janesville, Wis. Stephanie Cutter, deputy campaign manager for the Obama team, set the tone for much of the mainstream media when she leveled this accusation: “There’s no delicate way to put this, but he lied. He blatantly lied – and brazenly.”
No, he didn’t. Here is what Paul Ryan said:
President Barack Obama came to office during an economic crisis, as he has reminded us a time or two. Those were very tough days, and any fair measure of his record has to take that into account. My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, where we were about to lose a major factory.A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.’Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.
Chris Matthews and the gang over at MSNBC attacked the VP nominee like rabid dogs for these remarks. You could almost see the foam dripping from their mouths. Anderson Cooper on CNN tried to be a little more subtle, but the slick-sounding sleezeball was just as nasty in his comments about this part of Ryan’s speech.
But despite all of the weeping and wailing from the sanctimonious liberals, and below-the-belt accusations by the likes of David Axelrod, what Ryan said that night was 100 percent accurate.
Please note: He did not say that Barack Obama caused the plant to close. Or even that he should have kept the plant open. No, what Ryan said – and what is completely and absolutely true – is that candidate Obama told a Janesville audience back in February 2008 that if they would help elect him, “this plant will be here for another hundred years.”
Well, maybe the plant will be – as a darkened, shuttered hulk. But there won’t be any jobs there.
By the way, when candidate Obama returned to Janesville in October 2008, he repeated his pledge. Here’s what he said then:
As president, I will lead an effort to retool plants like the GM facility in Janesville so we can build the fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow and create good-paying jobs in Wisconsin and all across America.
Of course that’s not what we got. Instead, the President “saved” GM and Chrysler. He did it by costing taxpayers $25 billion, screwing the bondholders out of every penny they were due and giving the autoworkers union a huge chunk of the company’s stock.
None of which produced a single job in Janesville, Wis.
I can’t wait to see if Biden says anything about all of this when he and Ryan meet in their televised debate. I hope we get a little more substance than we’ve seen so far, which has been the equivalent of a bunch of school kids chanting, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.”
It would actually be amusing – if the fate of our Republic weren’t at stake.
Until next time, keep some powder dry.
–Chip Wood
