On Tuesday, former President Barack Obama — Mr. If You Like Your Doctor You Can Keep Your Doctor — publicly scolded politicians for rejecting objective truth and shamelessly lying to the American people, seemingly directing his comments toward President Donald Trump without ever uttering his name.
“Each day’s news cycle bringing more head-spinning and disturbing headlines,” started Obama, speaking at the 2018 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Johannesburg, South Africa. “Those in power seek to undermine every institution or norm that gives democracy meaning.”
“Too much of politics today seems to reject the concept of objective truth. People just make stuff up,” he continued. “We see it in the growth of state-sponsored propaganda. We see it in internet-driving fabrications. We see it in the blurring of lines between news and entertainment. We see it in the utter loss of shame among political leaders where they’re caught in a lie and they just double-down and they lie some more.”
“Politicians have always lied, but it used to be if you caught ‘em lying, they’d be like, ‘Oh, man.’ Now they just keep on lying,” Obama said.
“I don’t think myself a great leader just because I don’t just completely make stuff up. You’d think that was kinda just the baseline,” added the former president. “We see it in the promotion of anti-intellectualism, and the rejection of science.”
“And as with the denial of rights, the denial of facts runs contrary to democracy. It could be its undoing,” Obama declared.
Um, does the former Commander-in-Selfie not own a mirror? This is extremely bizarre coming from Obama, a man who oversaw numerous deceitful scandals during his tenure and directly lied to the American people.
Here are just a few examples:
“If you like your doctor, you’ll be able to keep your doctor; if you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan.” Obama told the American people this falsehood and variations of this falsehood while pushing Obamacare. Left-wing Politifact dubbed this the “lie of the year.”
“This (Mexican drug) war is being waged with guns purchased not here, but in the United States. More than 90% of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared border,” said Obama in 2009. As noted by James Bovard at The Hill, “This vastly overstated the actual problem, since that statistic measured only firearms that Mexican authorities sent to the U.S. for tracing.” But this was apparently the goal of the Obama administration, since they carried out the secret and scandalous “Fast and Furious” gunrunning operation via the ATF in the fall of 2009, which ended with the murder of a Border Patrol Agent by use of one of the weapons our government provided to a Mexican drug cartel. Some might perceive this entire operation as a “lie.”
“The day after Benghazi happened, I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism.” As reported by The Washington Post, “Obama did refer to an ‘act of terror’ in the immediate aftermath of the 2012 Benghazi attacks …. Then, over a period of two weeks, given three opportunities in interviews to affirmatively agree that the Benghazi attack was a terrorist attack, the president obfuscated or ducked the question. So this was a case of taking revisionist history too far for political reasons.” Moreover, the administration worked to cover-up the attack as a some sort of spontaneous backlash to a YouTube video.
Maybe Obama should sit-out the Truth and Integrity lecture.
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