Barack Obama wants the power of the presidency, but none of the responsibility of it. When ICE released thousands of incarcerated illegal aliens and blamed the sequester, President Obama and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano denied any having any role in the releases. They did this, despite the fact that they had both warned of the sequester’s dire consequences. Later a memo surfaced showing that government agencies have been taking pains to make sure that field offices are operating in sync with the White House’s sequester messaging.
Last week, after the sequester kicked in, someone canceled White House tours, and as ICE had done, claimed the cancellations were due to the sequester. But President Obama tells ABC’s George Stephanopolous, don’t look at him, he didn’t do it.
“This was not a decision that went up to the White House,” noted Obama in an ABC News interview aired on Wednesday, saying the directive came from the Secret Service.
The Secret Service works for him. It answers to him. And the Secret Service is supposed to be interested in the president’s security, not his messaging. If the decision to close the White House didn’t go to the White House, then where did it go? We need the name of the person who did make this call. And just what does Barack Obama do all day? What decisions does he actually make? Any?
Don’t expect George Stephanopolous to ask such obvious follow-ups. From the tours, Stephanopolous moved on to questions about North Korea, which was probably more appropriate than he realized given this administration’s penchant for propagandizing everything. Obama is the first president in US history to convert his presidential campaign into a political army that answers only to him. Until they become inconvenient, at which point he trots his taxpayer-funded White House spokesman out to say that Organizing for Action, previously known as Obama for America and then Organizing for America, is “independent.”
If you believe that, you’re likely to believe that Obama played no role in closing the tours of the house he currently lives in.
The optics of closing the White House tours haven’t played the way he and his political pros anticipated. It looks gimmicky and has hurt people who have planned their tours months in advance. Anyone with any sense at all can see that closing the tours closes the people’s house, and does nothing at all to address our massive debt. It was too easy to check and see that the tours don’t cost much at all, and it was too easy to check and see that despite the apocalyptic rhetoric that all the president’s men and women employed to terrify Americans about the tiny budget cuts, the government is still buying and it’s still hiring and not much has changed at all. Obama hasn’t cut back on his regulatory state at all, and he hasn’t cut the salaries of his top staff. He put the squeeze on the American people, and it’s backfiring on him. So no he says, hey, I had nothing to do with this.
What we have here is yet another clear and casual lie, not told by the president’s PR flaks or his minions, but by the president himself.
The consequences of Obama’s dishonesty may finally be showing up in the polls.
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