The Politics Of Fear

“I cannot guarantee that those checks go out…if we haven’t resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be money in the coffers to do it.”

President Obama in an interview with CBS News’ Scott Pelley

Politicians lie. We all know it. Congressmen, Senators, Cabinet Members even Presidents lie. The truth is that prevarication knows no party lines. It’s not more prevalent on one side or another nor does it only happen once in awhile, it happens constantly. They lie about things great and small, important and inconsequential. They’ll even lie about the color of the sky if it becomes politically expedient to do so. They lie about each other, they lie about their records in the public and private sector and they lie about caring what you and I think, hope for and feel.

We’ve come to accept this sad truth as a nation and even begun to categorize lying for them. We’ve decided to arbitrarily call some lies worse than others so we can better accept the fact that we never know when they’re telling the truth. Thanks to Bill Clinton, we now have a new category of lies. Lies about your private life are suddenly out of bounds and cannot be held up as evidence of poor character or a possible fault in leadership. Lying in your private life no longer matters when put into the context of your job performance. That’s fine if you live in a vacuum.

The media is complicit in helping us categorize lies told by politicians. In fact, they’ve led the charge in defining what constitutes a big lie and what constitutes a lie that doesn’t really matter. Republicans tell big lies, Democrats lie about things that don’t matter for the most part. Case in point: Anthony Weiner. The mainstream media by and large saw no problem that Weiner lied about the scandal that eventually forced him from office. Conversely, the lies told by Mark Foley were egregious and unforgivable according to Newsweek. Foley faced an unrelenting media barrage that sought to expose him for the creep he truly was yet did everything they could to minimalize the exposure of what a creep Anthony Weiner was. When hiding the truth was eventually unattainable, they changed their tactic to downplaying the severity of the scandal saying instead that it was his personal life and we had no right to stick our noses in it. It became a lie that didn’t really matter.

I started this piece with a quote from the President as a way to highlight the kind of lies that I’m talking about. The everyday, garden variety lies that politicians spew with amazing frequency. We have all become so jaded by the lies they tell that we hardly raise our eyebrows when a true whopper comes along. That quote is not just a lie. It’s a true whopper. More than being a lie, it’s a threat and that ventures into a whole new category of lying done by politicians. This particular lie though is of the variety that most often comes from the left. More often than not it comes from desperate Democrats trying hard to scare the right people into believing them. President Obama leveled the “lie laser” at seniors, the disabled and veterans and pulled the trigger hoping to singe as many people as possible.

It is, quite honestly, the most despicable lie that I have heard uttered by a politician in a very long time. Two that spring to mind are;

“I am not a crook.” Richard M. Nixon

“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” Bill Clinton

Not since Alexander Hamilton call John Adams a hermaphrodite has the political lie been so egregious, so obviously false and so easily refuted. Before I go into too much detail about the lies told by this man let me share some facts with you first.

During the period of May 12 - June 7, 2011, the federal government took in 296 billion dollars. That’s less than a month when you look at it. Interest payments on our debt totaled 14 billion dollars during the same period. Basic math tells me that there’s about 282 billion dollars left over for all federal spending during that period. Despite what the President may say, there is more than enough money to cover both the debt and the day to day operational costs of the federal government. The government takes in more than 2 trillion dollars in revenue annually even with the “low” tax rates that we currently enjoy. Sorry Mr. President, but math can be a bitch sometimes. Now, I’m not a degreed economist but I can add and subtract like the wind.

What the President is doing can only be termed economic terrorism. The truly disgusting part is that he’s doing it to senior citizens. He’s lying to the least among us as a means to an end. The end is tax increases on anyone making more than $250,000 a year and he’s willing to look your grandmother in the eye and tell her that her monthly check is in doubt to get what he wants. He’s more like a petulant child being told no so he’s going to hold his breath until he gets his way. The trouble is, too many people would believe him because most of them don’t think anyone would tell a lie that big and expect us to believe it. Still others would believe because they have no understanding of how money works in the federal government.

Let me ask another pertinent question. If Obama couldn’t get a tax hike done during the 2 years he controlled the White House and the Congress, why does he now expect Republicans to hand him their certain doom and his imminent reelection now? If raising taxes back in December of last year was so potentially injurious to the economy as to be out of the question, why would he think it’s a good idea now? Is the economy any better? Are the unemployment numbers any lower now as opposed to then. Not really. He’s insisting on tax hikes now only as a way to shatter the confidence that the republican base has in it’s new members in the House and Senate which he knows will ultimately hand him a victory in 2012. Not only his but a victory in the House as well. If Boehner or McConnell cave on the issue of tax increases they can kiss any hope for a majority in either house goodbye for at least 4 more years. Let’s read that quote one more time:

“I cannot guarantee that those checks go out…if we haven’t resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be money in the coffers to do it.”

Are we really supposed to believe that he would allow senior’s checks to stop before he’d consider shutting something nonessential off first? He does, after all, have the power to designate what gets paid and what doesn’t in the event the debt ceiling isn’t raised. The country would still be able to pay it’s bills for quite a few months before the effects of our current spending and taxation levels made it impossible to stay above water. I ran into a similar problem with my own personal “economy” recently due to increased healthcare costs and rising food and fuel prices. I’ll set the scenario and then let you judge who is the better economist, Obama or me.

Within the last few months, my hours at work had been reduced slightly due to what we call the “seasonal slowdown” It happens every year but with the economy the way it is, I found myself spending more on things like healthcare and food. Part of my own personal economy was unemployed so revenues had taken a dip accordingly. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? I sat down with my Treasury Secretary, my wife, and asked for ways to boost revenues or reduce spending. She came up with several very good ideas and we set about implementing them to prevent reaching our own “debt ceiling” and seeing our economy collapse. We looked at discretionary items that we could cut back on until the revenue crisis passed and came to the conclusion that there were several things that we spent too much money on and could ill afford to continue like…our addiction to cable TV and our DVR. We restructured our healthcare plan to reflect our actual needs and decided to forego the fancy cell phones and home phone plan we had always had. We got a Magic Jack as a gift and our cost for home phone dropped from $40 per month to $2 per month. A few minor cuts later and after looking at the balance sheet, our current revenue far exceeded our monthly demands. As I said, I’m not a degreed economic professional but even I know when I can and can’t raise revenue(taxes) and when and where I can cut out the pork spending to achieve the same net effect. By cutting the fat from my budget, I have effectively increased my revenue stream.

Is the President not smart enough to see this? Or is he just so inured with the idea of taxing the evil rich that he simply will not see how easy it is to trim the fat? The Federal Government spends more than $300,000 every year to study the effects of marijuana on monkeys during their menstrual cycles. Is that more important than paying social security benefits? We annually spend more than 1 million dollars to study the effects of mercury on fish and this is somehow more important than sending checks out to our disabled veterans?

That’s why I find his lie about checks not going out to be so offensive. First and foremost he’s using the politics of fear in such a way as to needlessly frighten millions upon millions of senior citizens, like my mother. Secondly, he’s insulting the intelligence of those of us who can actually add and subtract.

I am smarter than the President. I am also smarter than everyone at MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times and NPR. I am in fact, smarter than Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist and I have just proven it. Well, I’m either smarter than all those vaunted denizens of the media…or I am simply telling the truth where they are not.

You be the judge.