Obama, Story-Teller

[Geee]

National Review:

A sign of an undisciplined mind is serial lapses into self-contradiction, or blurting out a thought only to refute it entirely on a later occasion. For a president to do that is to erode public confidence and eventually render all his public statements irrelevant. That is now unfortunately the case with Barack Obama, who has established a muddled record of confused and contradictory declarations.

Last week, the president invoked executive privilege to prevent the release of administration documents related to the Fast and Furious operation. All presidents on occasion use that tactic, but rarely after they have put themselves on record, as did Senator Obama just five years ago, damning the practice as a de facto admission of wrongdoing. Does President Obama remember his earlier denunciation — or why he thought a special prosecutor was necessary to look into the Scooter Libby case, but not the far greater mess surrounding Eric Holder?

About the same time, President Obama offered de facto amnesty for an estimated 800,000 to 1 million illegal aliens. Aside from his circumvention of Congress and his casual attitude toward his own constitutional duty to enforce the laws as they are written, Obama had on two earlier occasions stated that he not only would not grant such blanket exemptions from the law, but also legally could not. That was then, this is now — the middle of a reelection campaign?

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Candidate Obama derided George W. Bush as “unpatriotic” for borrowing $4 trillion over eight years; what term might President Obama use to characterize his own record of borrowing $5 trillion in less than four years? “Extremely unpatriotic”? In his first year in office, Obama announced that he would deserve just a single term if the economy had not improved after his agenda was reified. What then is he to say to that earlier Obama when 8 percent unemployment is now in its 41st consecutive month, GDP growth is flat, and we continue to borrow $1 trillion per year?

As a candidate, Obama promised to play by the rules of public campaign financing, only to renounce that pledge when he was well on his way to raising $1 billion. Obama did not just promise to shut down Guantanamo and cease renditions, preventive detention, and military tribunals; he also denounced them in such venomous terms that his later embrace — or indeed expansion — of all these protocols was not so much hypocritical as surreal.