Barack Obama: Bamboozler-in-Chief

Phony Greek columns, anyone?

Remember back to the 2008 campaign? Before Obama had had a chance to break any of his campaign promises (his largest accomplishment so far), he had a word he like to use in his stump speeches: "bamboozle". It's a perfectly good word, I've used it myself, but for those of you not familiar with the term, it means:

to deceive or get the better of (someone) by trickery, flattery, or the like; humbug; hoodwink (often followed by into ): They bamboozled us into joining the club. Synonyms: gyp, dupe, trick, cheat, swindle, defraud, flimflam, hoax, gull, rook; delude, mislead, fool.

If Abe Lincoln had known Obama, he might have said, "You can bamboozle all of the people some of the time, etc."

To take another point from Obama's "Let's Pretend I'm T.R." speech (Teddy Ruxpin?):

To reduce our deficit, I've already signed nearly $1 trillion of spending cuts into law...

Now, on the face of it, that might sound like the most responsible thing for a president to do in hard economic times. What about what some people might call "lies of omission"? Or what the late Paul Harvey might have called, "the rest of the story"...

The truth is, the president's imaginary "cuts" are scheduled to take place over the next ten years, so divide that "trillion dollars" by ten and the impact of the cuts become negligible. That is to say, they would be negligible if they were real cuts. They're not.

Obama's bold deficit reduction cuts are cuts in the rate of increase only. In other words, Obama is planning on spending more money next year than this year, but wants to, wait for it, bamboozle people into thinking otherwise.

I wish that just one member of the Washington Press Corps (BTW, not "corpse", Mr. Obama!), would have the balls to stand up and ask him,

Mr. Obama, you say you have signed a trillion dollars in spending cuts. Tell us, exactly how much smaller next year's Federal budget will be compared to this years?

Mr. President?? Beuller???

You and I both know that Obama would dance around the question, probably blame Bush and then make sure that reporter's invitations were revoked from any future campaign bus trips.

Shouldn't someone be bold enough to ask the question? Are there no heirs to Edward R. Murrow? Obama might like to play act that he is FDR or JFK, or Reagan or Truman or TR, or even pretend he is taking a responsible approach to the deficit. Someone needs to call him on it. The watchdog press has become Obama's lapdog. Or maybe one of those little purse dogs, like Paris Hilton carries. It's time for the fawning bootlickers of the MSM to grow a spine and a little self respect. They tossed partisan softballs to Obama in '08 and as a result, we got the worst, and least serious president in the history of the republic. The public needs an impartial look at all the candidates running for president before next November...including the incumbent.

Update : Instapundit has video of candidate Obama promising to cut unnecessary government programs (perhaps some enterprising young reporter could ask exactly which programs Obama has cut in the last three years?), stop living beyond our means (other than trillion dollar "stimulus" bills), cut profligate spending and promised a "Net Spending Cut" if he were president.

"We need to eliminate a whole host of programs that don't work. And I want to go through the federal budget, line by line, page by page, (unless it interferes with my golf game), programs that don't work, we should cut."

- Barack Obama


Cross posted at LCR, Say Anything.