By Ed Brodow
ClashDaily Guest Contributor
In the interest of remaining positive, I always like to find something good in people. Even though I don’t like Barack Obama, I’ve been thinking, “What is there about him that is worth remembering?” You’ll be happy to know that I came up with something: Obama is without a doubt the biggest liar I have ever seen. He just proved it with his speech at the University of Illinois.
Obama began his speech by accusing the Republicans of fomenting division. “The politics of division and resentment and paranoia,” he said, “has unfortunately found a home in the Republican Party.” In fact, it is the Democratic Party that has made “divisiveness” into a house guest. The Democrats use their perverted version of “diversity,” says author Mark Levin, to exploit discontented elements in American society and to divide people against themselves. Obama’s presidency played into this leftist strategy of “divide and conquer.” After eight years of Obama, race relations are worse than ever and the country is on the verge of civil war.
Then Obama said that our democracy depends on people voting for Democrats, adding that he wants to restore “honesty and decency” in government. This is pure hypocrisy from a man who has shown contempt for the Constitution, a man who weaponized the powers of the federal government against his political opponents with the IRS targeting conservatives and selective prosecution of people like Dinesh D’Souza. “Obama created a climate in which the potentially criminal misuse of the DOJ and the FBI, as currently being unraveled, was not just acceptable but perhaps encouraged,” wrote Monica Crowley in The Hill, “thereby giving rise to what could be the most dangerous scandal in American history.” There is no evidence that Obama’s Democratic successors are likely to do any better for the cause of democracy.
In spite of all this, the University of Illinois evidently agrees that Obama is the savior of democracy. They gave him an award for ethics in government. While they are at it, the university should give David Duke an award for tolerance.
If we are talking about mendacity from a sitting president, Obama has no equal. During his tenure in the White House, he surpassed even inveterate liars like the Clintons. Thanks to Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of Obamacare, we know that Obama deliberately covered up the truth about his signature health legislation. His most infamous lie was the oft-repeated promise that, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” An article in the Chicago Tribune summed it up: “Smug Obama Administration Duped the Public.”
Obama also promised “no tax increases.” The 2012 Supreme Court ruling that Obamacare’s individual mandate is a tax means that the law violated the president’s pledge not to raise taxes on middle class and poor Americans. According to the Senate Budget Committee, “President Obama has imposed one of the largest tax hikes in American history on the middle class.”
His anti-war rhetoric that, “The global war on terror is over,” was another attempt to mislead the American public with a carefully worded campaign of misinformation. Obama tried to take the focus off of his ineffectual response to terrorism by saying, “No challenge poses a greater risk… than climate change.” Jeb Bush responded by saying, “That is perhaps the most ludicrous comment I’ve ever heard, that climate change is a bigger threat to our country than Islamic terrorism.” Political commentator Charles Krauthammer agreed, saying, “What planet is the president living on?”
And of course, we have this stalwart misrepresentation: “The economy is getting stronger… confidence is growing.” Obama’s policies of higher taxes and over-regulation had a disastrous effect on the economy. All the leading economic indicators showed decline under Obama’s anti-business onslaught. The Federalist concluded that Obama “has presided over the slowest, weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression.”
In spite of his awful record, Obama thinks he should get all the credit for the economic resurgence that is happening during Trump’s presidency. Obama predicted the economy would never grow above two percent. After Trump lowered taxes and began overturning Obama’s regulations, the economy jumped to over four percent. Commenting on this aspect of Obama’s speech, Sen. Lindsay Graham tweeted, “The more former President Obama speaks about the ‘good ol years’ of his presidency, the more likely President Trump is to get re-elected.”
Ed Brodow is a political commentator, negotiation expert, and author of seven books including his latest, Tyranny of the Minority: How the Left is Destroying America.
