Okay, 1st: Obama lied for 2 weeks about Benghazi. Now: he’s lying …about the lying

At this point, I’m really getting sick & tired of even hearing this disingenuous, illiterate drivel.

Unless you’ve been holed up in solitary confinement for the past two months, you’ve heard about the “did-he-or-didn’t-he” Benghazi discussion. President Obama and his team are pushing this retelling of history to

(A) insist he had “informed” the American people that Benghazi was terrorism in his 9/12/12 Rose Garden speech (he didn’t), and

(B) downplay the even bigger truth, which is Obama & Co lied to our face about a stupid video for two weeks AFTER the Rose Garden speech, and is now lying…about the lying.

Honestly, this has to be the most ridiculous argument I’ve seen in my adult life. We are being told to ignore what our eyes, ears and brain are telling us; to literally ignore an observable truth. I’m past incredulous that they’re even attempting this; now I’m just plain ticked off.

It’s not an insult to our intelligence; it’s insinuating that we have no intelligence whatsoever.

Here, watch the address again. Are YOU left with the impression that Obama is telling us the attacks in Benghazi were by terrorists?

Answer: NO, you’re not.

Now, why are you not? It’s because words mean things, and context matters. From Alana Goodman in Commentary Magazine:

If Obama wanted to call the Benghazi assault a terrorist attack in that speech, he had plenty of opportunities to do so. Instead, he described it as a “terrible act,” a “brutal” act, “senseless violence,” and called the attackers “killers,” …not terrorists.

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By the way, speaking just for the English & Grammar nerds in the room, the phrases “act of terror” & “terrorist act” are not even grammatically interchangeable: one describes an act (which could be done by anyone), the other describes an action done by a specific person.

Big. Difference.

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More from Alana Goodman:

Obama said during the speech that “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation” — but at no point was it clear that he was using that term to describe the attack in Benghazi. He’d also spent the previous two paragraphs discussing the 9/11 attacks and the aftermath. “Acts of terror” could have just as easily been a reference to that.

Or maybe it wasn’t a direct reference to anything, …just a generic, reassuring line he’d added into a speech which did take place, after all, the day after the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

By only focusing on the small, carved-out phrase “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation” from the rest of the speech, it allows the media and the Obama Administration to shape the context more easily.

Less to deal with; easier to lie about.

If you skipped over the video, go watch it; it’s short. Because no matter what else Obama was trying to convey to us that day, the attacks in Benghazi being terrorism wasn’t one of them.

Hey, “Bush-Lied-People-Died” crowd! Where are you guys NOW?

My, how times change.

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The White House has now acknowledged that the events on 9/11/2012 in Benghazi were, indeed, a terrorist attack. This comes on the heels of their insistence that, for two weeks, the attacks were inspired by a “YouTube video”. You will hear only a very few of the reporters (for now) report on the obvious and flagrant lie: the White House immediately suspected terrorism, and it now is certain that they confirmed this as a terrorist act within 24 hours.

Now, do me a lil’ favor, if you please: think back to the Bush years, when the mantra of “Bush Lied, People Died” became as ubiquitous as hearing “Bless you” after a sneeze. This narrative was constant: G. W. Bush had intricately planned and rationalized the Iraq War, misleading our nation & the world into a war-for-oil, and not to prevent Saddam Hussein from using his non-existent WMD’s.

Remember all that? I sure do.

Consider, then, that prelude to the War in Iraq took from September 12th, 2001 to March 19th, 2003. Over a year, with mountains of evidence. And somehow he fooled everyone? For over a year? This man, who throughout his presidency was repeatedly portrayed as being slightly dumber than a bag of hammers, was able to construct history’s most complex prevarication, without the truth leaking out? Code Pink and the Media would then have us believe Bush was, incongruously, the world’s first-ever ‘stupid evil genius‘.

Only Liberal logic could make that claim with a straight face.

And yet, the mantra persisted, and is still accepted as fact today by many in the self-professed ‘Smart Party’.

In contrast, this month is what it looks like when a president actually lies, even if that president is protected by the Media as if he were Charlemagne 2.0.

Because now, when his own Press Secretary says that it is “self-evident” (two weeks later, of course) that this attack was not from a whacked-out Muslim mob spontaneously reacting to an unknown YouTube clip but an actual act of terror, we have the Obama Administration flailing around, jumping from story to story, as each previous lie unravels.

And yes, the word is lie. 

Not a shading of the truth. Not spin. Not a fib. Not a dodge.

A big, fat, ugly, narcissistic, contemptible lie.

And a lie which cost, and will continue to cost, American lives. Coming on the heels of Fast and Furious, this is beyond unconscionable.

It will be all I can do to contain my emotions as I watch our current elected Commander-in-Chief waltz around the countryside, promising Utopian solutions to problems he has created. We keep precious little alcohol in our house at any one time, and I may need to stock up in order to cope.

But after watching the self-serving and pusillanimous way he has allowed these atrocities to occur and then tried to obscure the facts afterward, I can only hope you’ll join me in trying to alert everyone to his treachery prior to election day.

***Shorter version of that last sentence: “help us kick him to the curb”.

An Obliquity by any other name…

I just paid $4.05 per gallon to fill my car.

$4.05.

$71.00 for a tank of gas….and I drive a Camry, for goodness sake.

Regardless of where you live, you are paying a ridiculous amount for gasoline, and there appears no end in sight. Certainly not when President Genius sputters such inanities as “With only 2% of the world’s oil reserves, we just can’t drill our way to lower gas prices”.

This is pabulum, yet it persists.

I had as clients a couple of geologists whose job was coming up with the calculations for where to drill for oil and natural gas. Great guys. They were of one mind on this point: the US has as many or more natural resources per square mile of territory than any other country in the world. We are blessed with them. The problem is that we deny to ourselves their very existence and then lie about the reason.

Take the President’s words above. Only 2%? Really? By saying that, he is being deliberately duplicitous (read as: he’s fibbing).

By “reserves”, he undoubtedly is referring to “proved reserves”, which only counts oil that companies are currently drilling for in existing fields.

To quote the website oilprice.com:

How much recoverable oil does the U.S. have in addition to the 22.3 billion Obama had in mind? Start with the Green River Formationin Wyoming: 1.4 trillion barrels—sixty-two times as much as Obama counts.

After Green River, it’s almost embarrassing to count other sources: 86 billion on the outer continental shelf; 24 billion in the lower 48; 2 billion on Alaska’s north slope; 19 billion in Utah tar sands; 12 billion in ANWR. Then add in oil shale: 800 billion just in Wyoming and neighboring states. As IBD sums it up: “When you include oil shale, the U.S. has 1.4 trillion barrels of technically recoverable oil, according to the Institute for Energy Research, enough to meet all U.S. oil needs for about the next 200 years, without any imports.”

They even include a handy-dandy graph to depict more accurately what our actual energy situation looks like:

Newsflash to President Obama: bigger available supply = lower price.

“But, but, but, ….oil is priced on the world market”, they say, which is certainly true. But when more gas, or just the promise of more gas, enters the market, that changes the equation drastically. Then again, that is what the futures market does. It looks at what the energy demands and supply might look like….in the future. And, since we can’t control what the Middle East does with their oil supply, why wouldn’t we try to insure against any potential disruption by maximizing ours?

Additionally, if we are developing more resources here, producers will look to sell it where they can make the most profit. Given that there is one worldwide price and assuming that there is demand for it in the US (a relatively safe assumption), they stand to make more money selling as much as possible locally, rather than, say, in China.

In honor of my old algebra teacher:

faster delivery + cheaper transport = more profit.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Obama knows all this, of course. He is quite aware that he is giving a deceptive view of our energy capabilities. The probable answer to the question, “why??” is that he wants to give the impression of scarcity in order to make the case for wind, solar and other largely unviable means of energy.

Paradoxically, he has also made the following claim:

“Last year, American oil production reached its highest level since 2003. Let me repeat that. Our oil production reached its highest level in seven years.”

As I try to teach my boys, when you only tell part of the truth, it still amounts to a lie.

From freeenterprise.com:

The president did not paint an accurate picture of America’s energy reality on oil. Last year’s increase in domestic oil production is entirely a product of decisions to encourage new production that were made several years ago, in previous Administrations. The reduction in the percentage of oil we import occurred due to these previously-approved permits, as well as lower U.S. oil demand due to our weak economy.

The next big thing in energy will eventually come around and when it does, I’ll be one of the first in line. Until that day and then, only if it can compete on the open market, not developing as much of own energy as humanly possible makes as much sense as playing a hockey game where you only play defense and never take a shot:

you can’t win.

You can only, inevitably, lose.