How can you tell when Barack Obama is being honest? (Hint: It’s not easy)

Howard Portnoy, Liberty UnyieldingSeptember 9, 2014

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A: He tells you.

Blogger Ann Althouse points this out in a post on the president’s revealing interview with Chuck Todd on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.” The topic was Obama’s delay on executive action on immigration, and Todd accused the commander-in-chief of political expediency:

Todd: You made a decision to delay any executive action until after the election. What do you tell the person that’s going to get deported before the election that this decision was essentially made in your hopes of saving a Democratic Senate?

Obama went into “waffle” mode, ultimately arriving at this formulation:

Obama: Not only do I want to make sure that the T’s are crossed and the I’s are dotted, but here’s the other thing, Chuck, and I’m being honest now, about the politics of it. [Emphasis added]

Well, that’s sure convenient. An awareness of this disclaimer could come in handy in the future. It could have saved Victor David Hanson some 1,900 words in an essay published today on the many types of untruths Obama has told.

Imagine if Obama introduced every truthful statement with the same four words. There would be no need for his propaganda minister to double down on whatever the lie du jour happens to be.

There would, of course, be a downside for “fact checkers” such as PolitiFact and FactCheck.org, whose jobs depend largely on assessing the truth value of statements made by the president. Naturally, instead of fact-checking, the journalists involved could repurpose their websites into competence checkers, which would necessitate hiring new staff to keep track of Obama’s endless blunders.

The irony in all of this is that way back when he had the mainstream media in his pocket and a second term to cinch, Obama put out an appeal for a “Truth Team” to help ferret out the lies his enemies spread about him. Talk about audacity.

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