Top Ten

Political Lies

by D. J. Herda

And now for your general amusement and social edification, here are my picks for the  Top 10 Political Lies of 2010, as culled from the top lying politicians in the nation.

1. Ninety-five percent of "working American families" received a tax cut, according to Barack Obama.

Not quite.  In reality, the bill that the Democrats passed under the stealth of darkness gave tax cuts to those who pay taxes while dishing out money in the form of "tax credits" to everybody else.  Nancy Can't-Keep-Her-Tongue-In-Her-Pantsy Pelosi called this "just."  We call it welfare.

2. The General Motors bailout "worked."

Really.  Don't tell that to GM's bondholders, who are taking a thrashing.  They own $27 billion and they're getting 10 percent of the common stock in an exchange.  The United Auto Workers Union owns $10 billion of the bonds, but they're friends with the Prez, so they're getting back 40 percent of the stock.

3. The GM bailout actually made money for investors.

If the Obamaites would have kept their hands off GM, the private sector could have handled things, as it always does when a business runs itself into the ground.  Instead, Congress rewarded GM for negligence and greed, much to the delight of other major corporations that are lining up for their fair share.

4. ObamaCare health reform will "bend the cost curve down" and "let you keep your own doctor."

The fantasy of "savings" can happen only through devastatingly deep cuts in Medicare, which is not going to happen.  And if you think Obama's pledge that you'll be able to keep your doctor wasn't a whopper, listen to him now: "I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge."  Snuck in?  Wasn't he the one who signed the bill into law?

5. The tea party is "racist."

And everybody knows it.  Want proof?  The head of the NAACP told CNN's Anderson Cooper that tea party members used the racially coded rallying cry, "take our country back," to incite racial disharmony.  Sadly, the NAACP forgot that Dems, including Bill Clinton, Howard Dean, and John Kerry (among others) have also demanded they "take our country back."  Racists, all.  And tea partiers too, do you suppose?

6. The $800 billion "stimulus" funded millions of "shovel-ready" jobs.

Read Joe Biden's lips: June's "Summer of Recovery" report claimed that "shovel-ready" projects created jobs.  Tons of 'em.  Said the vice-president: "Between ... tax relief, direct aid, and shovel-ready projects, the Recovery Act has ... created or retained between 2.2 and 2.8 million jobs."  Although his boss, the following October, admitted, "There's no such thing as 'shovel-ready projects.'"  Oops.

7. The congressional stimulus package "saved or created" 3.5 million jobs.

The administration had promised America that 90 percent of the "saved or created" jobs would be private sector and thus good for the economy.  But columnist Veronique de Rugy found, "Four out of five jobs created were created in the public sector.  (Two years into the stimulus); 682,370 jobs were reported created, not 3 million; and over 510,000 of these [3 out of 4] were in the public sector."

8. There is a "consensus," according to the White House, that the stimulus plan "pulled us back from the brink of economic disaster."

Consensus?  A poll by the independent Pew Research Center found that nearly two-thirds of Americans thought the stimulus did not contribute to job creation, a fact that rising unemployment rates and skyrocketing inflation confirm.

9. The 111th Congress was the "most productive" since (choose one) the New Deal, LBJ's Great Society, or the beginning of the Republic.

If by "productive" you mean costly, we might share common ground.  The deficit tripled from the '08 budget.  The past two years produced nearly $4 trillion in new debt (more than any other Congress in history).  And all this congressional "productivity" cost the Democrats their House majority and their Senate supermajority.

10. Bush-era "deregulation" caused the Gulf oil spill.

Since-deposed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Bush placed "the employees of Big Oil in charge of regulating their own industry."  In fact, the oil extraction business remains one of the most heavily regulated and scrutinized in the world.  Obama's administration, not Bush's, approved the Deepwater Horizon project that led to disaster--a fact he continually neglects to recall publicly.

AND A BONUS LIE!

11. Guantanamo Bay will be shut down in 2010.

Obama promised a closure in the first, and then in the second, year of his administration.  No dice.  Gitmo still exists today for one reason: It confines Islamo-Fascists who want to kill American "infidels" at any cost.  No other country that we can trust to keep these killers at bay will have them.  Still, the President's promise made for great sound bites.

So the next time you hear some glib talk about the Tea Party hate mongers and Sarah Palin and George Bush and conservative war profiteers, stop for a moment to question the source and the rationale behind the words.  And then check out the sources.

You may just find the real meaning of all that rhetoric to be nothing near what it was intended to be.

And I…am D. J. Herda.

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D. J. Herda is President of the American Society of Authors and Writers (http://amsaw.org), an organization made up of authors, writers, editors, publishers, agents, directors, producers, and other media professionals who rely upon the printed word in the creation of quality literature and entertainment.  He is a member of the Author's Guild, a former member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and a former member of the National Press Club.  He has published more than 80 books and several hundred thousand articles, short stories, columns, interviews, plays, and scripts.
 

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