President Barack Obama’s interview with David Letterman Tuesday may provide a bonanza of campaign material for the Mitt Romney campaign. Letterman led off with the hard-hitting question “How much do you weigh?” before getting into even harder-hitting questions, such as “Would you like to say something to the empty chair?” That exchange was an obvious set-up to gig Clint Eastwood’s speech at the Republican National Convention.
After spending a few minutes discussing the Democratic convention and the First Lady, Letterman then exposed his ignorance and Obama’s dishonesty at the same time.
“Here’s what I found troubling [at the Republicans' convention]…They had the clock, the debt countdown clock and, I mean, this thing is going like crazy and it’s several trillion dollars. Now, what is that?” Letterman asked.
Obama responded with a selective edit of government spending, accusing his predecessor of choosing to “launch two wars” (the United States was attacked on 9-11-01, and responded). After that, Letterman asked for a hard debt figure: “Now, do you remember what that number was? Was it $10 trillion?”
“I don’t remember what the number was precisely,” the president said.
The President of the United States claimed that he did not know, even to the round number of $16 trillion, how much debt the nation is in.
Is that not a reason, all by itself, to vote him out of the job?
Letterman asked if Americans should be scared of the size of the debt, and Obama allowed that it is a problem long-term and medium-term, but not short term. The size of the debt and the government’s failure to respond to it has already caused two downgrades of the US credit rating, and threats of more downgrades to follow. Prior to Obama’s term, American credit had never been downgraded.
Later in the interview, Obama called for even more government spending. He called it “investing,” but it was a call to spend more money on roads, bridges and other government projects. His 2009 stimulus package was sold to the American public as just such spending. Obama also promised to shut down government programs that don’t work. He made an identical promise as a candidate in 2008, but has never followed up on it as president.
The Washington Post’s Eric Wemple gives Obama a bit of a pass for refusing to say the national debt figure, writing “No daylight for the fact-checkers there: Since the debt is moving so fast, precise recollections are all but impossible.”
$16 trillion is a perfectly acceptable round figure to use. Until we hit $17 trillion, anyway.
In 2008, then Sen. Obama knew precisely what the national debt figure was. He used it to accuse President George W. Bush of being “unpatriotic.”
Here is the president’s complete Letterman interview.
Letterman asked if Americans should be scared of the size of the debt, and Obama allowed that it is a problem long-term and medium-term, but not short term.
“Short Term” meaning until Nov 7. Then it will be a problem requiring the suspension of the Constitution and declaring him as POTUS/savior for life.
Letterman is a painful, twisted, pitiful shell of what he used to be, but neither now nor back when, was he capable of having a meaningful political discussion on his show.
Nor, perhaps, has Obambus.
Litterbox passed his sell-by date a looooong time ago.
And if Hussein doesn’t take the national debt seriously, we certainly do.
The best thing about Obama is that if he were to be unconscious for a time, like to have an operation or something, nobody would have to worry about replacing him. It’s unlikely anyone would even notice. Hey, like an empty chair!
Who are these people applauding….930 executive orders, this man has eliminated the congress completely. Sells weapons to cartels, sues AZ then complains about AZ to the UN, 43 churches suing him, he is suing four US states, NDAA takeover of food, fuel, TV, internet, etc. lied about placing the health care bill on the internet five days before he signed it, he signed it withing 36 hours, 29 countries in the mid east burning our embassies and flags, now we have problems with the Chinese willing to fight over islands seized by the Japanese in WWII…..enough, this man has done enough damage……….look beyond the charm, he is killing this country.
I agree with all that you said except that I have yet to see his charm or his intelligence for that matter. He seems to still be living in his college freshman days when he was gobbling up all that baloney his anti-American professors were feeding him while they gladly accepted their “capitalist” pay checks.
One thing always bugs me about the “Bush spent Clinton’s surplus” meme… a couple of very significant events occurred in those days – 9/11 in 2001 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
In the aftermath of both events, Congress appropriated huge sums of Federal Funds in open ended spending. Money was poured into the clean up and paying out survivors benefits – we are still provided open ended health care for the rescue workers. Huge new security programs and agencies were enacted and grants given to local police and fire departments.
In the aftermath of Katrina, Congress again authorized billions in open ended spending, handing out cash benefits, free housing and rebuilding efforts that are still going on 7 years later.
So yes, we fought 2 wars under Bush, but Congress authorized a tremendous amount of spending on two major disasters for which the American people have never seen a clear accounting and made commitments that multiplied the baseline funding of many existing government agencies and added many new agencies with open ended budgets.
Always nice to see The Most Intelligent And Important Man On The Planet to take a break from those tiresome numerous intelligence briefings and communicate with less important beings than Himself.
With this interview, Obama has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that everything he “knows” about economics and history is wrong, everything he doesn’t know about either subject would fill entire libraries, and that he could not possibly care less about either of them. And as with his hero FDR, he can never tell the truth when a lie would suit his purposes just as well.
Uh huh, the fact checkers just can’t find anything on this guy, Saturday Night Live and late night talk show hosts can’t find anything funny to say about him, and journalists can’t find any inconsistencies in what he says and does.
The number shall not be spoken
How can the most brilliant man in the world not know the extent of the national debt after all, it is only talked about EVERY DAY? Can you imaqine the screaming in the print and electronic media that would occur if George W. Bush had said such a thing?