In What Universe Is Obama Living?

Barack Obama in Nordea Concert Hall, Estonia, September 3, 2014
Flickr.com/Johan Viirok

It is getting harder and harder to cut President Obama some slack with his utterly outrageous statements!  We all remember when he declaimed — repeatedly — that with Obamacare “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

Prevarications and Misstatements 

Yet these repeated misstatements were only the beginnings of Obama’s assault on the truth. Even before he took office, Obama promised that unlike Bush, he would not have any lobbyists working for his administration. Yet by February 2010 more than 40 lobbyists were on his payroll. On another occasion during debate on a debt-ceiling agreement, he rashly claimed that 80% of Americans would support an increase in their taxes as a part of the deal. Yet that very week a Rasmusson poll showed only 34% believed a hike in their taxes should be included. Concerning what happened to the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, he said

“Here’s what happened. . . . You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character who — who made an extremely offensive video directed at — at Mohammed and Islam . . . making fun of the Prophet Mohammed. And so, this caused great offense in much of the Muslim world. But what also happened, extremists and terrorists used this as an excuse to attack a variety of our embassies, including the one, the consulate in Libya.”

Yet, subsequently we have all learned the administration knew in real time during the Benghazi attack that an al-Qaeda group was responsible. In fact, a Defense Department document from the Defense Intelligence Agency dated the day after the attack said the assault had been planned by the Brigades of the Captive Omar Abdul Rahman (BCOAR), an affiliate of al-Qaeda, for the anniversary of 9/11 “to kill as many Americans as possible.” Nevertheless, for weeks the administration put out the lie that a video produced by a Coptic Christian in the United States was the cause of the attack.

I could go on for a very, very long time about the President’s prevarications, misstatements, and other forms of dishonesty, but you get the point. If you are a glutton for punishment and would like to see more, check out the following posts:

• The Corruption of the Democratic Party
• Hillary Clinton and Obama’s Lies on Benghazi — Too Many to Count, but Let’s Try
• 1,063 Documented Examples of Barack Obama’s Lying, Lawbreaking, Corruption, Cronyism, Hypocrisy, Waste, Etc.
• All False statements involving Barack Obama
• Here They Are … Barack Obama’s FIVE BIGGEST LIES — Can You Guess Them? (Video)

Obama’s Leftist Orientation

Recently, I wrote a post on the fantasies that are the economic plans of Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton. In its introduction to illustrate the economic ignorance exhibited by many of our major political figures, I cited a quotation from an Obama speech to students in Buenos Aires. Unfortunately, I suspect what Obama said was not exactly a lie, but something in which he really believed. He claimed that there is “no difference between capitalism and communism, choose whatever works”. You should check out the video of his speech linked above to make sure that there is no meaning lost through lack of context.

This statement greatly shocked Reuven Brenner, a McGill University professor in the faculty of Management, who had grown up under communism and who had seen both his parents arrested on false charges. Obama’s statement motivated Brenner to write,

How can a president of the US get it so wrong?  And just 30 years after communism fell?  Or without so much of [sic] correcting himself saying: “Though remember, Germans believed that fascism worked for the German tribe for a while, and communism had its Gulags and starved millions, and don’t forget all the people who disappeared under Latin American dictatorships, communist or other, or radical Islamism, for that matter.  So perhaps I misspoke.”  No, there is no such correction in his speech.  Obama’s statements make Bernie Sanders success and repeated call for “revolution” before screeching crowds more comprehensible.  The lack of outcry is actually deafening.

Obama’s Economic Management the Best in Modern History?

Then this morning while watching Varney & Company on the Fox Business Network, I heard of another outlandish Obama statement demonstrating that he really is living in a different universe from the one I inhabit. The show’s host, Stuart Varney, related what a New York Times interview revealed about Obama’s economic beliefs. Obama’s attitudes so shocked Varney that he ranted on them off-and-on for the rest of the show. At the show’s end Varney offered an apology for his rant — probably required by the show’s producer — but for the life of me, I could see nothing wrong with Varney’s reaction. You can see a video of some of his reaction here.

The single most incendiary quote from the NYT interview, President Obama Weighs His Economic Legacy, was the following:

I actually compare our economic performance to how, historically, countries that have wrenching financial crises perform,” he said. “By that measure, we probably managed this better than any large economy on Earth in modern history.

What? How can Obama possibly claim this? Conservatives such as myself will often observe that our current economic “recovery” is the worst recovery since the one following the Great Depression of the 1930s. The NYT post, written by a sympathetic Andrew Ross Sorkin, remarks on this by quoting the Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff. When Sorkin asked Rogoff about this “worst recovery” epithet, Rogoff replied:

“Well, have we had a systemic financial crisis since World War II?” he asked rhetorically. “I mean this was like nothing we’ve experienced since World War II. The 1982 Volcker recession was nothing compared to this, and so you have to look at the nature of the shock.”

Point taken, but there is a lot of evidence that the very long duration of the Great Depression was due to the federal government’s anti-free-market policies, as I detailed, at least in part, in the post Why Did the Great Depression Last So Long? Similarly, there is a huge amount of evidence that the long duration of low-growth recovery from the Great Recession (almost seven years now) is due to the anti-free-market policies of the Obama and previous administrations. For evidence I offer the contents of the following posts:

• The Burden of Economic Regulations
• Beware BEPS!
• The Debilitating Effects of Obamacare
• Causes of the 2007-2008 U.S. Financial Crisis
• Economic Effects of the Dodd-Frank Act
• The EPA, CO2, Mercury Emissions, and “Green Energy”
• Economic Effects of Current Tax Policy
• Economic Damage Created by the Fed
• Big Corporations Abandoning the U.S. at an Increasing Rate
• What to Do About Keynesian Secular Stagnation

Because of all this evidence. I am not about to buy Rogoff’s excuse for Obama’s “worst recovery”, which deserves its epithet. How bad has Obama’s “recovery” been? Consider the plot below that compares the GDP growth rates of several recoveries.

In particular, compare the GDP growth during the Obama recovery (yellow curve) with that during the Reagan years (blue curve).

So tell me, from what universe has Obama come?

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