Monday, March 9, 2009

Is The Media Starting To Wake Up From Obama Haze? Newsweek: "Why Obama's Rhetoric Hides His Double Talk"

Take this with a grain of salt; this is the same Newsweek which celebrated socialism and told us Radical Islam is a fact of life, live with it!

But at least Robert J. Samuelson sees through the NON-TRANSPARENCY in his column: "Why Obama's Rhetoric Hides His Double Talk"

To those who believe that Barack Obama is a different kind of politician—more honest, more courageous, more upfront—please don't examine his administration's recent budget. If you do, you may sadly conclude that he resembles presidents stretching back to John F. Kennedy in one crucial respect. He won't tax voters for all the government services they want. That's the main reason we've run budget deficits in 43 of the past 48 years.

Barack Obama is a great pretender. He constantly says he's doing things that he isn't, and he relies on his powerful rhetoric to obscure the difference. He has made "responsibility" a personal theme, and the budget's cover line is "A New Era of Responsibility." He claims that the budget begins "making the tough choices necessary to restore fiscal discipline." It doesn't.

Let's recognize that, with today's depressed economy, big deficits are unavoidable for some years. Let's also assume that Obama wins reelection. By his last year, 2016, the economy will have presumably long recovered. What, then, does his final budget look like? Well, it runs a $637 billion deficit, equal to 3.2 percent of the economy (gross domestic product), projects Obama's Office of Management and Budget. Just for the record, that would roughly match Ronald Reagan's last deficit, 3.1 percent of GDP in 1988, so fiercely criticized by Democrats...

It is Obama's conceit—perhaps his cockiness—that he can ignore these blatant inconsistencies. Like many smart people, he believes he can talk his way around any problem. Perhaps he can. In this, he has an ally in much of the mainstream media, which seem so enthralled with him that they can't recognize glaring contradictions. During the campaign, Obama claimed he would change Washington's petty partisanship; he also advocated a highly partisan agenda. Both claims could not be true. The media barely noticed; the same obliviousness persists. But Obama still runs a risk: that his overworked rhetoric loses its power and boomerangs on him.


Of course, I've been saying this for months: he says one thing and does another and the media allows it to happen. Still, I remain hopeful that Obama's gift for gab will eventually backfire on him.

Hopefully, the media begins to change its tune.

At the very least, this is a start!

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