FOD 2013.12.09

This falls into the category of preaching to the choir, but here are excerpts from two excellent articles highlighting obama's (1) flawed understanding of government, and (2) his basic dishonesty.

First, in a delicious bit of irony, barry blames the obamacare problems on "big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly." Isn't that what conservatives have been saying for years - government is too big and inefficient?

President Obama has found someone to blame for the Affordable Care Act's rolling failures besides Republicans. ObamaCare is the government's fault, not his.

On Thursday, Mr. Obama dropped by American University for a heart to heart with Chris Matthews, and the MSNBC host wondered who in the executive branch is responsible for the botched health-care rollout. Mr. Obama listed a few impersonal culprits including "cynicism," "Washington gridlock" and "the management of government," but he then drifted into another classic.

"The challenge, I think, that we have going forward is not so much my personal management style or particular issues around White House organization," he said. "It actually has to do with what I referred to earlier, which is we have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly. . . . The White House is just a tiny part of what is a huge, widespread organization with increasingly complex tasks in a complex world."

So after five years, Mr. Obama has discovered government is inefficient and wasteful, or at least it is when he needs a political alibi.

That incompetence and bureaucratic bungling is why so many of us oppose obamacare, and other expansions of the federal government. I can't think of a thing the government does that can't be done better, cheaper, and quicker by the private sector.

Second, as the recent revealization that barry lived with Uncle Omar shows, obama and his staff are incorrigible liars. By "liars" I mean they routinely hide the truth, by either lies of commission or lies of ommision, or both.

One definition of a pathological liar is someone who lies where the truth would serve just as well. When President Obama’s uncle, Onyango Obama, was arrested in 2011 for drunk driving, the truth — that Obama had stayed with his uncle years earlier for several weeks as a Harvard law student — would have served the president just fine. No potential Obama voter would have held it against him that an uncle he had stayed with two decades earlier was picked up for DUI.

Yet the White House went with a lie, claiming that Obama had never met his uncle.

Now that the lie has been exposed, thanks to testimony from “Uncle Omar” at his deportation hearing, the White House says it got its facts wrong. Why? Chiefly because it relied on Obama’s book Dreams From My Father, which contained no reference to uncle Omar.

How ridiculous is this? We are asked to believe that instead of checking with Obama, the only available person who could know the extent of his relationship with Omar, his flacks issued a denial based on book that doesn’t even purport to be autobiographically accurate.

Dreams From My Father does not, of course, provide a definitive list of Obama’s acquaintances. But more than this, Obama has said that the book uses pseudonyms and contains composite (or “compressed”) characters. Thus, it would make no sense to deny Uncle Omar’s existence based on his non-appearance in the book.

So what explains the denial? The most straightforward explanation is pathological lying — the impulse to deny, deny, deny whenever an embarrassing story, even an essentially innocuous one, appears. In this scenario, staff (perhaps at Obama’s direction; perhaps not) decided to deny that Obama had met Uncle Omar provided there was nothing in Obama’s book, or elsewhere in the record, that would show otherwise. Believing they could get away with the lie, they lied.

Another possibility: "it is Obama’s policy not to have staff ask him about his past."

Under either explanation — pathological lying or willful failure to learn the truth — we’re at a sad place. An administration that can’t be trusted accurately to provide basic biographical information about the president is an administration that can’t be trusted to provide accurate information about anything.

That pretty much says it all...