Truth. Why do politicians struggle with truth and fail at it so badly? I mean most politicians of any party, but there have been two egregious examples lately that really made me shake my head in wonder: Barack Obama and Wendy Davis. It seems that neither of them would know truth if it rose up and bit them on their butts, and for things that have been demonstratively easy to uncover at that. So it makes me wonder why they’d even try.
I want to start with Wendy Davis, since her’s is the most recent debacle. Wendy, a Texas legislator put a story out about her “struggles” in life. She opined that she was a teen mother who valiantly had her child and as a single mother put herself through college and Harvard Law on, in her words “loans and scholarships” to find a better life. Almost brings a tear to your eye. Except very little of it was true.
Let’s start with teen mother. Technically, she was a teen, but barely. She was 19 when she had her first daughter, and she was married at the time. She wasn’t a single mother until she was 21 when she divorced her first husband. This little gem of a fact was first lied about, under oath, in a Federal court. In a Federal lawsuit over redistricting, Davis testified that “I got divorced by the time I was 19 years old.” She wasn’t divorced until she was 21, and she filed the divorce papers when she was 20. Oops. Then she opined how hard it was to be a single parent and attend college and Harvard. I guess it is really hard to parent from Boston, when your kids are in Texas being cared for by your second husband. Second oops!
Now let’s talk college and law school. Davis claims that she paid her way through Texas Christian University and Harvard Law on “loans and scholarships” except there’s this pesky little thing about her second husband. He paid for her last two years she attended TCU and all her time at Harvard. He cashed in his 401k account to pay for law school, and he took out the loan for her last year there. She was so grateful that she waited until 2005 to divorce him… the day after he made the last loan payment. “I made the last payment, and it was the next day she left,” Jeff Davis stated in an interview. Bad form oops, for sure!
Then there are the little things like how she said she’d never been a Republican, but ran as one in her first attempt to a seat on the Fort Worth city council; the allegations of adultery; her “shared” custody of her daughters when it was really awarded to her second ex-husband.
My favorite was this little gem “I am pro-life,” a statement she made after the abortion filibuster last year. I particularly love that one because, of course, all pro-life people fight legislation to protect women and the unborn from dangerous late term abortions and unlicensed back office procedures. Really? That’s the biggest whopper of them all. Davis is not, under any definition of the word, pro-life.
Oh Obama, where do I even begin? There is a whole website dedicated to all his lies, and proof of their veracity year by year! The IRS scandal, the NSA scandal, lies about his opponents, about the sequester, about “Fast and Furious”, about the economy … well, let’s just talk the latest and two biggest and most provable lies: Benghazi and “if you like your plan you can keep your plan, period.”
A Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reported last week that the September 11, 2012, attack on U.S. diplomatic outposts in Libya was completely avoidable. The report found that the CIA, NSA and Pentagon, among others, were aware of and warned the State Department on numerous occasions. It also showed that the intelligence community knew that terrorist groups were threatening, and later responsible for the attacks. So what did Obama do? He sent U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, to the Sunday talk show circuit to lie. She was instructed to say that, per the White house, they “knew” that the attack was a “spontaneous” protest and due to a YouTube video. Given the intelligence reports above, and the security video to the contrary, it begs one to wonder how stupid he thinks we are. Obama continued to lie about it for months afterward.
The granddaddy of them all is… “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan, period.” This one was actually Politifact’s “Lie of the Year” for 2013. Obama said it 23+ times, all while knowing it was a bald faced lie. First, because he knew that the law was going to require serious upgrades to existing “substandard” policies. Why write a law requiring people to buy “better” health insurance and then allow them to keep the “substandard” ones? He never intended that, so while the ACA grandfathered policies, in effect, as of March 23, 2010, DHHS wrote regulations that narrowed what could be grandfathered. Then in July 2010, more regulations were put in place that meant that most of individual market customers will not be able to keep their policy. Obama kept saying well into 2012 that “If you already have health insurance, you will keep your health insurance.” Demonstratively wrong.
All politicians lie and I’m not saying Republicans don’t. It just makes me shake my head that once confronted with the truth, why continue the farce? Again, how dumb do you think we are?
Image: Courtesy of: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mdfriendofhillary/9144909368
