It should be four. But three still means Barack Obama is a lying liar. Here’s the lie.
“Now Governor Romney believes that with even bigger tax cuts for the wealthy, and fewer regulations on Wall Street, all of us will prosper. In other words, he’d double down on the same trickle-down policies that led to the crisis in the first place.”
— President Obama, in a new two-minute television ad released Sept. 27, 2012
“This election to me is about which candidate is more likely to return us to full employment. This is a clear choice. The Republican plan is to cut more taxes on upper income people and go back to deregulation. That is what got us into trouble in the first place.”
— Former president Bill Clinton, in an Obama campaign ad running since August
Barack Obama bears more responsibility for the financial collapse than Bush ever did. Obama and his fellow Democrats politicized bank lending on home loans, forcing banks to lend to people who were not credit worthy. That led first to the bubble, as more people entered the home loan market, and then led to the collapse, as more people defaulted on loans that they could not afford. There were other angles and factors, but that’s the basic gist of the housing collapse.
Obama and the Democrats have successfully escaped responsibility for all this, largely because the pathetically biased media won’t call them on it.
The pathetically biased media also won’t call Obama on his Libya cover-up, or his allowing federal scofflaw Kathleen Sebelius to keep her job, or for telling federal defense contractors to go ahead and violate federal law instead of sending out layoff notices as they’re supposed to — required to by federal law.
It is time for the Obama campaign to retire this talking point, no matter how much it seems to resonate with voters. The financial crisis of 2008 stemmed from a variety of complex factors, in particular the bubble in housing prices and the rise of exotic financial instruments. Deregulation was certainly an important factor, but as the government commission concluded, the blame for that lies across administrations, not just in the last Republican one.
In any case, the Bush tax cuts belong at the bottom of the list — if at all. Moreover, it is rather strange for the campaign to cite as its source an article that, according to the author, does not support this assertion.
We nearly made this Four Pinocchios but ultimately decided that citing deregulation in conjunction with tax cuts kept this line out of the “whopper” category. Still, in his effort to portray Romney as an echo of Bush, the president really stretches the limits here.
Three Pinocchios
So Glenn Kessler gives Obama three Pinocchios for deflecting blame for the housing collapse that just about brought down the entire financial system. It’s a monstrous lie, insulted by the childish Pinocchio treatment, but whatever. It’s about all we can expect from the pathetically biased, dishonest, threat to the republic that the mainstream media has become.
It’s time the media retire this silly fact-checking game and just do its job. Obama has three possible career-ending scandals swirling around him right now. Four, if you count Fast and Furious. Two of these four scandals have actual body counts: The two Americans killed in connection with Fast and Furious, and the four killed in Libya.
How many Pinocchios are six dead Americans and dozens of dead Mexicans worth?
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