Obama Parted Company with the Truth Long before the Townhall on Guns

In September 2014, the New York Post published an article titled "5 lies that have shaped the Obama presidency." Its first sentence was : "If past presidents are remembered for their signature achievements, Obama will be remembered for his signature lie: 'If you like your health care plan, blah, blah, blah.'" The article then noted "75 significant lies since his campaign for president began, but that doesn’t begin to tally the casual fibs and hyperbole he spouts seemingly every day." It then listed the NYPost's top Obama lies : *5. “My father left my family when I was 2 years old.” (FACT. Obama never spent a night under the same roof as his father, let alone two years.) *4. “The Fast and Furious program was a field-initiated program begun under the previous administration.” (FACT. It began in October 2009 under Obama and Holder. Earlier, then White House press secretary Jay Carney made the same false claim at a press conference on national TV and White House correspondent Jake Tapper, then with ABC, said “It began in fall 2009,” correcting him.) *3. “Not even a smidgen of corruption.” (FACT. Obama said this in reply to a Bill O’Reilly question about the IRS scandal : “You’re saying no corruption?” But, when the IRS scandal first made headlines, Obama had said : “It’s inexcusable, and Americans are right to be angry about it, and I am angry about it.” __Obama, May 2013. Facts later proved the lie.) *2. “We revealed to the American people exactly what we understood at the time.” (FACT. During the same interview, Obama made the claim in answering O’Reilly’s inquiry about the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi. In fact, it was exactly a week after the attack, on September 18, 2012, that Obama took his first questions about Benghazi, saying this to David Letterman : “Here’s what happened, You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character who - who made an extremely offensive video directed at - at Mohammed and Islam.” We know now that the administration knew this wasn’t true -- they knew it the very night of the attacks.) *1. “Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.” (FACT. Obama told this whopper to his staff on his first day in office. He promised it to the press. Instead, his administration refuses to hand over documents and Obama refuses to answer questions. As liberal constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley said of the presidency, “Barack Obama is really the president Richard Nixon always wanted to be.”) ~~~~~ The frightening thing is that Americans don't know whether Obama actually believes his lies -- or is deliberately lying for sinister reasons. Does Obama really believe it isn't corrupt when the IRS targets conservative groups for audits to help his re-election campaign? Does he truly believe that his failed presidency is all President George W. Bush’s fault? ~~~~~ Dear readers, having endured so many Obama lies, how can we believe anything he says about guns? At the Town Hall on guns last Thursday, President Obama's lies continued. Taya Kyle, widow of “American Sniper” Chris Kyle, pointed out that while the murder rate is at an all-time low, gun ownership is at an all time high. She asked, “Why not celebrate who we are?” An uneasy Obama said national trends don’t necessarily hold true in all locales, but he never explained why areas with the strictest gun controls tend to have the highest murder rates -- except to blame Indiana for taking "trunkloads" of guns to nearby Chicago, his "hometown" -- with one of the highest gun death rates and some of the strictist gun laws in the US. Obama said : "Many guns in Chicago come from Indiana where there are no background checks." FACT : Indiana law explicitly requires dealers to do a background check before transferring a handgun, by contacting the FBI directly. Indiana law doesn't explicitly require firearms dealers to do background checks before transferring long guns, but Indiana must contact the FBI as for handguns. Tomorrow, we'll discuss the rest of Obama's Townhall gun lies.