SocraticGadfly: Obama lies and fact check July 19

July 19, 2011

Obama lies and fact check July 19

"Obama lies, people die?" Many people who would have said similar with the name of (George W.) Bush a few years ago are silent as Obama and his administration lie about drones killing civilians in Pakistan, CIA black sites in Somalia and more.

Jeremy Scahill says on MSNBC that Obama is able to get away with stuff that McCain wouldn't have been able to, because he had been elected. Essentially, the antiwar movement was defanged by Obama's election, with a fair chunk of it being Obamiacs.

Scahill adds that, in terms of things like lack of secrecy, the CIA is as much a clusterfuck as ever.

Meanwhile, in the fact check world, the Pea Party gets a name. It's the "austerians," led on the right-neoliberal/now-neoconservative Democratic side by ... shock me ... Robert Rubin and acolytes and on the GOP side by Pete Peterson. All of their major claims about the debt are partially to totally wrong, yet Obama still worships them.

More fact check. Obama mangles Lincoln's relationship to the press over the Emancipation Proclamation. I don't know whether he's that historically uninformed, or this was a deliberate play to compare himself to Lincoln, mixed with his typical thin-skinnedness about criticism from the "left" that he once, for public consumption at least, welcomed. That said, "left" is in scare quotes because Arianna Huffington ain't Left.

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