Ann Coulter Walks Us Through
Obama Defender's Latest
Absurdity
This is Ann's "Ha Ha Ha, You fell
for THAT??!!" face.
If you watch MSNBC & read liberal blogs like 'The Daily Kos', then there's no way you missed seeing this the past couple of days:
"Federal spending under Obama at historic lows ... It's clear that Obama has been the most fiscally moderate president we've had in 60 years."
"You are TOTALLY going to buy this, aren't you?"
Let's watch how masterfully conservative columnist Ann Coulter deconstructed this travesty:
It's been breaking news all over MSNBC, liberal blogs, newspapers and even The Wall Street Journal: "Federal spending under Obama at historic lows ... It's clear that Obama has been the most fiscally moderate president we've had in 60 years." There's even a chart!
I'll pause here to give you a moment to mop up the coffee on your keyboard. Good? OK, moving on.
Think for a moment how incredibly counter that claim is to the mass perception of Americans who have watched what Obama's done since he took office. Oh Obama's not a big spender? The Tea Party has is all wrong? There's been no $5 trillion added to the national debt in the past 3 years because Obama & the Democratic Congress didn't go on a huge spending spree from 2009-2010? Some answer that by claiming 'yes'.
This shocker led to around-the-clock smirk fests on MSNBC. As with all bogus social science from the left, liberals hide the numbers and proclaim: It's "science"! This is black and white, inarguable, and why do Republicans refuse to believe facts?
Since Ed Schultz is a buffoon, I totally get why
he fell for this.
Ed Schultz claimed the chart exposed "the big myth" about Obama's spending: "This chart -- the truth -- very clearly shows the truth undoubtedly." And the truth was, the "growth in spending under President Obama is the slowest out of the last five presidents."
Note that Schultz also said that the "part of the chart representing President Obama's term includes a stimulus package, too." As we shall see, that is a big, fat lie.
But what's David Cay Johnston's excuse?
Hell of an investigative reporting job there, David!
Schultz's guest, Reuters columnist David Cay Johnston confirmed: "And clearly, Obama has been incredibly tight-fisted as a president."
Everybody's keyboard OK?
I may have sputtered a little but, but my keyboard is indeed fine. So how did others in MSNBC's lineup handle this startling news?
"I'm so much smarter than you,
there should be a law against it."
On her show, Rachel Maddow proclaimed: "Factually speaking, spending has leveled off under President Obama. Spending is not skyrocketing under President Obama. Spending is flattening out under President Obama."
In response, three writers from "The Daily Show" said, "We'll never top that line," and quit.
So Maddow instantly buys a claim put forward that federal spending has not been skyrocketing under Obama. As we're going to see in a minute, an even cursory glance at the figures & the chart put out to advance this incredible story would demonstrate what you have to believe to accept the premise, and it's clear Maddow did so without even a quibble.
Inasmuch as this is obviously preposterous, I checked with John Lott, one of the nation's premier economists and author of the magnificent new book with Grover Norquist: "Debacle: Obama's War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future." (I'm reviewing it soon, but you should start without me.)
It turns out Rex Nutting, author of the phony Marketwatch chart, attributes all spending during Obama's entire first year, up to Oct. 1, to President Bush.
That's not a joke.
This is how desperate they've gotten to bend reality and help Obama hide his actual record on spending: they are simply going to go for broke and tell you a huge whopper.
That means, for example, the $825 billion stimulus bill, proposed, lobbied for, signed and spent by Obama, goes in ... Bush's column. (And if we attribute all of Bush's spending for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and No Child Left Behind to William Howard Taft, Bush didn't spend much either.)
Nutting's "analysis" is so dishonest, even The New York Times has ignored it. He includes only the $140 billion of stimulus money spent after Oct. 1, 2009, as Obama's spending. And he's testy about that, grudgingly admitting that Obama "is responsible (along with the Congress) for about $140 billion in extra spending in the 2009 fiscal year from the stimulus bill."
Yes, the Wall Street Journal isn't just Republicans & Conservatives.
There are also Democrats there who will desperately try to hide
Obama's real spending record. Who knew?
Nutting simply shoves over $1 trillion in new spending from Obama's 1st year in office into Bush's presidency and then points out how awesome Obama's spending numbers look once you do that.
Yes. Really. He did that. And there is no way Maddow & Schultz and Markos & every other leftist tool touting this Marketwatch chart & article could have missed it if they'd spent even 1 second questioning what they were being told.
Nutting acts as if it's the height of magnanimity to "attribute that $140 billion in stimulus to Obama and not to Bush ..."
On what possible theory would that be Bush's spending? Hey -- we just found out that Obamacare's going to cost triple the estimate. Let's blame it on Calvin Coolidge!
Nutting's "and not to Bush" line is just a sleight of hand. He's hoping you won't notice that he said "$140 billion" and not "$825 billion," and will be fooled into thinking that he's counting the entire stimulus bill as Obama's spending. (He fooled Ed Schultz!)
The theory is that a new president is stuck with the budget of his predecessor, so the entire 2009 fiscal year should be attributed to Bush.
But Obama didn't come in and live with the budget Bush had approved. He immediately signed off on enormous spending programs that had been specifically rejected by Bush. This included a $410 billion spending bill that Bush had refused to sign before he left office. Obama signed it on March 10, 2009. Bush had been chopping brush in Texas for two months at that point. Marketwatch's Nutting says that's Bush's spending.
Coulter doesn't bother to go into this in her column, but anybody who followed the budgetary politics of Bush's 2nd term knows quite well Congress is the one who actually passes a budget - and they did not do so for the final 3 years of Bush's presidency. They passed one for Obama...and then have refused to pass another for over 1,000 days.
Nutting acting like he's going to do Bush a favor and not attribute that additional $140 billion in stimulus funding to him is laughable. He'll only tag Bush with the original $825 billion stimulus bill. So Bush gets credit for $825 billion of the stimulus that failed, and Obama is only responsible for $140 billion of it, according to this reasoning. This way, he avoids the real truth that it is Obama alone who is responsible for new spending over $1 trillion on stimulus bills while unemployment hasn't dipped below 8% for over 2 years.
Obama also spent the second half of the Troubled Asset Relief Fund (TARP). These were discretionary funds meant to prevent a market meltdown after Lehman Brothers collapsed. By the end of 2008, it was clear the panic had passed, and Bush announced that he wouldn't need to spend the second half of the TARP money.
But on Jan. 12, 2009, Obama asked Bush to release the remaining TARP funds for Obama to spend as soon as he took office. By Oct. 1, Obama had spent another $200 billion in TARP money. That, too, gets credited to Bush, according to the creative accounting of Rex Nutting.
There are other spending bills that Obama signed in the first quarter of his presidency, bills that would be considered massive under any other president -- such as the $40 billion child health care bill, which extended coverage to immigrants as well as millions of additional Americans. These, too, are called Bush's spending.
That Rex Nutting - or anybody else - could proffer this stupidity with a straight face tells you how bad Obama's record is on spending. Obama rammed through well over $1 trillion in new spending in his first year in office with a compliant Democratic super-majority in Congress giving him whatever he wanted, And now in a desperate attempt to save Obama from the consequences of what he did, we have people trying to float this idea that it was actually President Bush who was responsible.
They are basically saying to all the Americans who lived through both the Bush & Obama presidencies: "Who are you going to believe? Us or your lying eyes?"
Frustrated that he can't shift all of Obama's spending to Bush, Nutting also lowballs the spending estimates during the later Obama years. For example, although he claims to be using the White House's numbers, the White House's estimate for 2012 spending is $3.795 trillion. Nutting helpfully knocks that down to $3.63 trillion.
But all those errors pale in comparison to Nutting's counting Obama's nine-month spending binge as Bush's spending.
If liberals will attribute Obama's trillion-dollar stimulus bill to Bush, what won't they do?
Nothing, of course. Once you are desperate enough to engage in sleight-of-hand stupidity like this, there really is no Rubicon you won't cross. I would go on further to argue this is an encouraging sign, that the Left is dumb enough to grab and champion an article like Nutting's without even taking 5 minutes to seriously examine it's premises.
What is one of the most prominent ridicules the Left makes of the Right? That Conservatives just parrot talking points, accept handed-down Narratives from their leaders, can't think for themselves, & don't spend any time questioning or poking holes into what they've been told?
Trust me: as we get closer to November, we're going to see the Left expose itself like this again and again. Some new narrative like Nutting's will spring up and Lefties will grab it and run with it with both hands and parrot exactly what they're told to say, just in time for the narrative to fall apart on them and embarrass them yet again.
Projection: Everything Lefties claim is true of Conservatives is true of them. Maddow, Shultz, and every other Lefty blog that trumpeted this nonsense by Nutting just proved it again.
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