OPINION:
President Barack Obama campaigned on a promise of hope and change — that his would be the most transparent administration in history.
What we’ve come to find out is Mr. Obama’s White House is one that promotes a culture of deceit, one that serially lies to the American public to protect his political legacy.
Mr. Obama will do anything, say anything, to secure his agenda. Hillary Clinton is also well-versed in this Saul Alinksy-type modus operandi, where you pick your target, freeze it, personalize it, then polarize it. Truth be damned.
Let’s review some of the falsehoods dictated to the American people by the White House — starting with the most recent. Then ask yourself — do you want another four years of this duplicity masterminded by Mrs. Clinton?
This week the Benghazi report was released, demonstrating how lying to the public has become standard operating procedure within the Obama administration.
Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican and Rep. Mike Pompeo, Kansas Republican, detailed how the administration knew almost immediately after the attack on the American consulate it was one of terrorism, but were unwilling to admit it to the American public.
Officials spoke privately of the 9/11-inspired terror event, both within their own circles and to foreign diplomats, and had eyewitness accounts confirming as much.
However, terrorism wasn’t the political narrative Mr. Obama wanted heading into an election season — especially since he’d been campaigning on the successes of killing Osama bin Laden and how al Qaeda had been “decimated” under his watch — so the truth had to be spun.
“Here’s what happened … You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character who — who made an extremely offensive video directed at — at Mohammed and Islam … making fun of the Prophet Muhammad. And so, this caused great offense in much of the Muslim world. But what also happened, extremists and terrorists used this as an excuse to attack a variety of our embassies, including the one, the consulate in Libya,” Mr. Obama explained to David Letterman at the time.
Not only was it a blatant lie, but it was also used to manipulate — to garner sympathy for the Muslim world, as if they were wrongly provoked. Mr. Obama was condemning us stupid Americans, for not knowing what offends the Muslims — for thinking we could be attacked simply because we’re infidels.
But the deception doesn’t stop there.
Earlier this month, the State Department was forced to admit it altered a press briefing video to hide an exchange in which a spokeswoman seemed to indicate officials lied when the Iranian nuclear talks began. Then there were reports that a White House transcript was altered, in another discussion about Iran.
Apparently, there’s lots to hide about the Iranian deal.
It was presented as an alternative to war, but really it was nothing more than a great capitulation to one of our most mortal enemies, so Mr. Obama could check off another so-called political accomplishment.
White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes admitted as much to The New York Times Magazine in May.
Mr. Rhodes boasted how he, at the president’s bidding, lied and spun concerns that the president wanted a deal with Iran’s nuclear-weapons program so bad he was making too many concessions to the mullahs.
Mr. Rhodes invented the public sales pitch that the White House was negotiating with a new moderate Iranian regime (not only is there no such thing, the negotiations started in 2012 before the new regime’s election) and bragged about how young reporters would believe anything he told them.
Apparently so.
Remember how the president repeatedly promised in his first term that if you liked your health-care plan you could keep it? The media ate it up. So Mr. Obama actively campaigned on the line to get buy-in for his Affordable Care Act all the while knowing it wasn’t true. It later came to light that White House policy advisers had told him to drop it, but were overruled by political aides.
Mr. Obama relied heavily on smoke and mirrors campaign to pass Obamacare as well.
The bill’s chief architect Jonathan Gruber famously bragged that a “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical in getting the thing to pass.”
And it did. He won. On lies.
Add to this, White House spokesman Josh Earnest’s false claim Mr. Obama “wasn’t specifically referring to” the Islamic State when he called them “JV terrorists,” or Mr. Obama’s lie that his “position hasn’t changed” in using executive authority to grant amnesty, or that the Fast and the Furious gun-walking operation didn’t start in his administration, or the false assertion that “for the first time since 1990, American manufacturers are creating new jobs.”
And what do you have?
A serial liar. Pathological even.
Benghazi, the Iranian deal, Obamacare. Enough is enough.
Let’s turn a new page come November.
• Kelly Riddell is a columnist for The Washington Times.
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