Obama's Doublespeak Met With Talk Radio Laughter

THE ART OF SELF-HURLING

Rush: Obama Denounces His Own Policies!





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Has Barack Obama just thrown himself under the bus? Yesterday's baffling comments on deficit spending seem to have the president denouncing his own policies, which had Rush Limbaugh relishing the apparent doublespeak during today's program.

First, the story from Obama's New Mexico visit, where the comments were made:

Obama Says U.S. Long-Term Debt Load ‘Unsustainable’


By Roger Runningen and Hans Nichols

May 14 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama, calling current deficit spending “unsustainable,” warned of skyrocketing interest rates for consumers if the U.S. continues to finance government by borrowing from other countries.

“We can’t keep on just borrowing from China,” Obama said at a town-hall meeting in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque. “We have to pay interest on that debt, and that means we are mortgaging our children’s future with more and more debt.”

Holders of U.S. debt will eventually “get tired” of buying it, causing interest rates on everything from auto loans to home mortgages to increase, Obama said. “It will have a dampening effect on our economy.”

Earlier this week, the Obama administration revised its own budget estimates and raised the projected deficit for this year to a record $1.84 trillion, up 5 percent from the February estimate. The revision for the 2010 fiscal year estimated the deficit at $1.26 trillion, up 7.4 percent from the February figure. The White House Office of Management and Budget also projected next year’s budget will end up at $3.59 trillion, compared with the $3.55 trillion it estimated previously.

Two weeks ago, the president proposed $17 billion in budget cuts, with plans to eliminate or reduce 121 federal programs. Republicans ridiculed the amount, saying that it represented one-half of 1 percent of the entire budget. They noted that Obama is seeking an $81 billion increase in other spending.

Entitlement Programs

In his New Mexico appearance, the president pledged to work with Congress to shore up entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. He also said he was confident that the House and Senate would pass health-care overhaul bills by August.

“Most of what is driving us into debt is health care, so we have to drive down costs,” he said.

But as the Washington Post reported in March (via the Heritage Foundation's response shown here), Obama's own wild spending is the cause of the deficit:

President Barack Obama has repeatedly claimed that his budget would cut the deficit by half by the end of his term. But as Heritage analyst Brian Riedl has pointed out, given that Obama has already helped quadruple the deficit with his stimulus package, pledging to halve it by 2013 is hardly ambitious. The Washington Post has a great graphic which helps put President Obama’s budget deficits in context of President Bush’s.

What’s driving Obama’s unprecedented massive deficits? Spending. Riedl details:


* President Bush expanded the federal budget by a historic $700 billion through 2008. President Obama would add another $1 trillion.

* President Bush began a string of expensive finan­cial bailouts. President Obama is accelerating that course.


* President Bush created a Medicare drug entitle­ment that will cost an estimated $800 billion in its first decade. President Obama has proposed a $634 billion down payment on a new govern­ment health care fund.


* President Bush increased federal education spending 58 percent faster than inflation. Presi­dent Obama would double it.


* President Bush became the first President to spend 3 percent of GDP on federal antipoverty programs. President Obama has already in­creased this spending by 20 percent.


* President Bush tilted the income tax burden more toward upper-income taxpayers. President Obama would continue that trend.


* President Bush presided over a $2.5 trillion increase in the public debt through 2008. Setting aside 2009 (for which Presidents Bush and Obama share responsibility for an additional $2.6 trillion in public debt), President Obama’s budget would add $4.9 trillion in public debt from the beginning of 2010 through 2016.

Obama's gaffe had Limbaugh salivating at the opportunity to call attention to what could be the most blatant example of hypocrisy in recent political history:

RUSH: This is the guy who has just saddled us with $11 trillion in budget deficits for the next ten years, warning that his own policies have wrecked the US economy and that they cannot be continued. He threw himself under the bus. We can't continue Obamaism. Just barely over a hundred days into his administration, Obama has condemned his own administration, and nobody in the Drive-By Media gets this. They're still praising the guy for showing fiscal restraint and understanding the dangers that are out there. It just gets funnier and more ridiculous each and every day. This is an historic event, the first time in presidential history where a president has thrown himself under the bus.

A scathing attack on Obama's spending policies by Obama, in which Obama warns that those spending policies cannot be sustained. It is impossible to make too big a deal of this. So you have ask, "Is Obama the new Houdini?" You know, it's Barack H. Obama. Does the "H" now stand for Houdini? Is he trying to escape all responsibility, that he has no responsibility for his own votes for TARP?

Don't forget, before he became president, he voted for all of these bailouts. He voted for all of this spending. TARP passed budgets as senator, Porkulus, Earmarkulus, the current budget deficit, just this year about $2 trillion. I mean, this is as bold as Nancy Pelosi saying the CIA lied to her about waterboarding. Charles Krauthammer has a great point. Why didn't they lie to anybody else, why did they only lie to her? And he's got an even better point about this in a column today. Everybody heard what the CIA said we're going to do, these extreme techniques, and nobody's stood up and said, "Well, you can't do that, that's torture," so maybe none of this was actually torture. And of course by definition, by statutory definition in this country, it can only be torture if you intend it to be. In other words, torture cannot happen by accident.

Anyway, we'll get to Pelosi here in just a second. I have a unique take on that, too, because, I'll tell you, with Pelosi, we're getting a real test of the glass ceiling here. We are going to get a real test of the glass ceiling with Pelosi. But I'm still stuck here, folks, on Obama condemning his first 100 days in office. (laughing)

He has just stated with more clarity than ever and brevity than ever how he has wrecked the economy for years to come. He just told everybody, he just condemned what he did. He just ripped to shreds everything he's done in the first 100 days. I think what's actually going on here, he knows that he's being followed around by a bunch of sycophants who are gonna die of anal poisoning before the year is out, and his voters are just space cadets still in love with the whole image thing. So he's probably setting up the reasons why all taxes will need to be raised. But I'll tell you, I almost got on my knees last night and prayed to God that the American people understand how absurd this is that the president of the United States, after a mere 100-plus days, has just thrown his own administration, all of his policies, under the bus, just condemned them, just ripped them to shreds. I mean he has been more forcefully critical of his own policies than he ever was of George W. Bush.

Memo to Obama: is it really wise to complain about your own policies? It sure makes the opposition's job that much easier.


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