Obama a Very Smooth Liar

It isn't quite
fair to call Barack Obama a liar. During the campaign he carefully
avoided committing to much of anything important that he might have to
take back later. For now, I won't quibble with The St. Petersburg
Times's Obamameter, which so far has the president keeping 30 promises
and breaking only six.

And yet, broadly speaking, Obama has
been lying on a pretty impressive scale. You just have to get past his
grandiloquent rhetoric -- usually empty of substance -- to get a handle
on it. I offer a short, incomplete list, which I'm sure others could
easily enlarge.

• Obama portrayed himself as the peace
  candidate, or at least the anti-war candidate. He is not a peace
  president, nor is he stopping any wars. True, he promised military
  escalation in Afghanistan (to blunt John McCain's accusations of
  wimpishness), but well-meaning folks believed their new hero would
  genuinely move to end the occupation of Iraq and seriously try to
  negotiate with the Taliban. Instead, he has not only increased the
  number of troops and attacks against the Afghan insurgency, he has also
  expanded on George Bush's cross-border raids into Pakistan, which have
  killed many civilians. The way things are going, Pakistan could become
  the new Cambodia and Obama the new Nixon.

  In Iraq, Obama has
  promised to withdraw all the troops . . . unless, which means that
  we're not leaving. Whether it's 50,000 troops remaining at the
  "invitation" of the so-called government of Iraq, or just enough to man
  the 14 permanent military bases, or some combination of U.S. military
  personnel and private mercenaries that exceeds 50,000 soldiers, our
  army will almost certainly stay in Iraq past the stated deadline of
  Jan. 1, 2012.

• Obama said he wanted to reform Washington and
  "fix" its "broken" system of corrupt lobbying. But Obama is neither a
  reformer nor a skilled legislative mechanic. Hatched from the Daley
  Machine in one-party Chicago, Obama wouldn't be president today if he
  rocked boats. Witness the appointment of Roland Burris by the corrupt
  former Gov. Rod Blagojevich to fill Obama's Senate seat: not a word of
  public protest from the new administration because Burris is a made man
  in the Chicago Democratic organization. So what if "Tombstone Roland"
  can be heard on the U.S. attorney's wiretaps of Blagojevich, dancing
  around the delicate question of how to raise money for Blago without
  appearing to be buying his seat.

  As for pork-barrel politics,
  Obama named one of its greatest champions, Chicago's own Rahm Emanuel,
  as his chief of staff, and the new budget (as well as the "stimulus"
  package) is loaded with pork. Meanwhile, have you heard anything
  serious about campaign-finance reform from Obama? Not very likely from
  someone who refused public financing and still has about $10 million
  left over from record receipts of $745.7 million. It's just a detail, I
  know, but Obama's naming of former Raytheon lobbyist William Lynn III
  as deputy secretary of defense seems to be at odds with the president's
  alleged crusade against special interests and the "revolving door"
  between private business and government. He has also "sold"
  ambassadorships to campaign donors. The biggest plum, London, is slated
  for Lou Susman, a Chicagoan and former Citigroup executive who bundled
  $239,000. Paris has been reserved for Charles Rivkin, who raised about
  $500,000 for Obama.

• Obama, with his Arabic middle name and
  his big Cairo speech, wants people to think that he is the Muslim
  world's new best friend. Well, the photograph of a cheery Obama with
  Saudi King Abdullah and a smiling Emanuel with Saudi Foreign Minister
  Saud al-Faisal, proves the contrary. The Saudi royal family hates the
  idea of representative government for ordinary Muslims and is cruelly
  indifferent to the fate of the Palestinians. A democratic, independent,
  partly secular Palestine could only make the Saudi oligarchy look bad.
  Thus, the House of Saud is perfectly happy with the status quo, and so,
  evidently, is Obama.

  Without Saudi pressure, there will be no
  resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, since Saudi oil is the
  only lever that would cause America to press Israel into making real
  concessions. Indeed, the president doesn't mean for one minute to force
  Israel into anything more than symbolic withdrawals of its illegal
  settlements on the West Bank. Meanwhile, the Saudi elite continues to
  play its double game, paying protection money to extremist Islam and
  granting pensions to the relatives of suicide bombers. It's just
  politics, say Barack and Rahm, grinning ear-to-ear with their sleazy
  new friends from Riyahd. Just keep the oil pumping around election time
  and all will be well.

• Obama makes like he's a friend of
  organized labor, at least he did during the Ohio primary when he needed
  to beat Hillary Clinton. At the time, he put out a flier headlined
  "Only Barack Obama fought NAFTA and other bad trade deals" and charged
  that "a little more than a year ago, Hillary Clinton thought NAFTA was
  a 'boon' to the economy." In a debate with Clinton on Feb. 26, 2008, he
  said, "I will make sure that we renegotiate [NAFTA] in the same way
  that Senator Clinton talked about" and "use the hammer of a potential
  opt-out as leverage" to get "labor and environmental standards that are
  enforced."

  But two months ago, U.S. Trade Rep. Ron Kirk said
  such a blunt instrument was no longer necessary and that the leaders of
  Canada, the U.S. and Mexico were now "of the mind that we should be
  looking for opportunities to strengthen [the North American Free Trade
  Agreement]." And, of course, there is no discussion at all about
  renegotiating Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, a "bad trade
  deal" that has done even greater harm to American workers and unions
  than has NAFTA.

Meanwhile, as I noted in my April 15 column,
"Wall Street sharks circle the UAW," Obama and his banker friend Steven
Rattner are liquidating the United Auto Workers even as they liquidate
the American auto industry. Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's
pseudo-secretary of labor, said as much. "The only practical purpose I
can imagine for the bailout is to slow the decline of GM to create
enough time for its workers, suppliers, dealers and communities to
adjust to its eventual demise," he wrote last month in the Financial
Times -- no surprise, considering that Obama's chief economic adviser
remains Lawrence Summers, a champion of deregulation and "free-market"
economics in the Clinton administration and very much the enemy of
labor unions.

Yes, of course it's nice to have a president who
speaks in complete sentences. But that they're coherent doesn't make
them honest.