Barack Obama is widely seen as a complete failure. Businesses large and small are turning on him and his incredibly harmful economic policies. Even former staunch allies such as US News & World Report owner Mortimer Zuckerman and GE CEO Jeff Immelt have turned on him.
His answer? To turn to an impeached, disbarred, lying and oath-breaking, sexual predator and unconvicted rapist to save a failed president for the sake of the Democrat Party.
From Reuters:
WASHINGTON, July 14 (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama sought on Wednesday to lift sagging confidence in his economic stewardship by enlisting the help of predecessor Bill Clinton, as a leading business group issued a scathing critique of the administration’s policies.
Clinton, who presided over the 1990s economic boom, joined Obama at a closed-door White House meeting with business leaders to encourage job creation and investment, including in clean energy.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a top business group, issued a rebuke of Obama’s economic agenda, accusing him and his Democrats in Congress of neglecting job creation and hampering growth with burdensome regulatory and tax policies.
What this country needs is a return to “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
It doesn’t matter that Clinton once recognized that Obama is little more than a Chicago thug.
It doesn’t matter in this Obama-era of race-baiting that Obama played the race card on Clinton.
It doesn’t matter that Bill Clinton subsequently demonstrated that he frankly deserved to be labeled as a racist when he outraged Ted Kennedy by telling him regarding Obama, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.” Or that Clinton essentially said, “MAYBE joining the Ku Klux Klan was wrong” in honoring the former Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd.
All that matters in the mainstream media propagandist cesspool is that – while Barack Obama is increasingly recognized to be a complete economic failure and fraud – Bill Clinton is an economic hero who can therefore temporarily restore confidence in Obama and his failed policies until after the November election.
As usual, the media isn’t telling the full truth about Clinton. Or what happened to create the healthy economy of the 1990s.
The mainstream media is remarkably consistent: you can count upon them to never give Democrats the blame they deserve, and you can count upon them to never give Republicans the credit they deserve, about anything.
Bill Clinton is widely hailed for presiding over a great economy that featured a budget surplus.
But let’s consider a very basic fact:
From the Herald-Journal, January 27, 1984”
If you took a quiz on government and were asked who writes the national budget, would you answer “The President” or “The Congress”?
The correct answer is “The Congress.”
The U.S. Constitution says that power belongs to Congress. All through our history, the Congress has exercised that power. The president cannot spend one thin dime that has not been approved by Congress.
Article One of the Constitution of the United States refutes the argument that Bill Clinton should receive credit for his “surplus”. It was the Republican-dominated CONGRESS featuring promises that stemmed from the Contract with America, that resulted in the healthy budget that Clinton the media gave Clinton credit for producing. Even though all he did was sign (often after vetoes) that which Republicans had actually produced.
What we don’t get told very was that Bill Clinton did such a miserable job running the country for his first two years in office that he suffered the largest (at least until this coming November) political defeat in American history when the Republicans swept into power over both the House and the Senate. We’re not told that Republicans continued to be the majority party in both the House and Senate during the years that the media assigned Clinton all the credit.
It was those Republicans who were most responsible for the good times that resulted. They are most certainly responsible for the budget surpluses that Democrats have congratulated themselves for ever since. The very first item on the Republicans’ agenda was the Fiscal Responsibility Act.
One quick example of these Republican changes was welfare reform. In his 1996 State of the Union, after losing even more fights, Bill Clinton was famously forced to admit, “The era of big government is over.” And Republicans were making that statement true by passing welfare reform legislation and an avalanche of other cost-cutting measures that made a budget surplus possible.
Two welfare reform bills were passed by the Republican Congress, which Clinton vetoed. Then a third bill was passed by the Republicans, which Clinton finally signed. The National Organization for Women noted:
“There is little difference between the welfare bill (H.R.4) which the president vetoed in January and the new plan H.R. 3734/S 1795.”
An analysis by Steven Dawson for the Saint Louis University Law Journal observed that:
“In fact, President Clinton vetoed two largely similar prior versions of the bill.”
All rhetoric aside, Bill Clinton was FORCED to sign welfare reform into law by the Republican Congress. Just as he was FORCED into a balanced budget, and any subsequent budget surplus.
But after being literally dragged into signing it, Bill Clinton took credit for it as though it had been his idea all along. And the media duly reported that slanted history as a matter of “fact.”
That said, we can also point out that “the Clinton budget surplus” also had a lot to do with budgetary smoke and mirrors.
And like I said, the same media that will never give Republicans credit for something good will never give Democrats blame for something bad.
Consider the last three plus years’ worth of reckless spending. The Bush administration has been blamed for much of this reckless spending, but it was actually a Democrat Congress that swept into power in 2006 (largely due to what we can now readily see was hypocritical demagoguery over the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina rather than any economic issue) which proceeded to spend America into the stratosphere:
For the record, the last budget from a Republican President AND a Republican Congress – FY-2007 (passed in 2006) – resulted in a$161 billion deficit at a time when unemployment was 4.6%. That’s what happened the last time the GOP was in control.
What happened when the Democrats took control in January 2007? Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi passed a FY-2008 budget that had a $459 billion deficit – nearly three times the deficit in the immediately previous Republican-passed budget. Three times. And this before the financial crisis that somehow “necessitated” all this massive spending.
Now, that’s a pretty crazy increase under Democrat control. But you aint seen nothin’ yet.
The Democrats passed a FY-2009 budget with a staggering, mind-boggling, totally reckless $1.42 TRILLION deficit.
The FY-2010 budget approved by Reid and Pelosi and signed by Obama had an estimated $1.6 TRILLION deficit.
The deficit has increased from $161 billion in the last budget before Democrats took control of the Congress (FY 2007) to $1.42 trillion in the most recent fiscal year (FY 2009)—an increase of $1.26 trillion or 782%.
With three months remaining in the fiscal 2009 budget, the federal deficit just officially passed the $1 trillion mark. Worse yet, Obama borrowed more than forty cents for every single dollar he spent.
We also suffered a budget shortfall of $94 billion in the month of June, which marks the first June in more than ten years (read, “encompassing the entire Bush presidency”). Bush’s success in raising revenues is bookended by two Democrat presidents who failed.
And now the Democrats aren’t even bothering to pass a budget for the next fiscal year, so they can simply spend without any accountability whatsoever.
The old annual deficits under Republicans have now become the monthly deficits under Democrats:
In the 12 years that Republicans controlled the House, the average deficit was $104 billion (average of final deficit/surplus FY1996-FY2007 data taken from Table F-1 below). In just 3 years under Democrats, the average deficit is now almost $1.1 trillion (average of final deficit/surplus FY2008 and 2009 data taken from Table F-1; FY2010 data taken from Table 1-3). Source: CBO January 2010 Budget and Economic Outlook
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Minority Whip) rightly pointed out on ABC’s “This Week”:
“If you look at the kind of deficit that we’ve incurred over the last three years that the Democrats have been in control of Congress, 60% of the overall deficit from the last ten years has occurred in that period. And frankly with the incurrence of the debt, we’ve seen very little result. That’s why we think we ought to choose another way.”
And yet the media falsely blame BUSH and Republicans for that spending, rather than Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the Democrat-controlled House and Senate, even though factually speaking the Democrats were ENTIRELY to blame for every single penny that was spent from January 2007 on. Because our Constitution forbids a president from spending; it is CONGRESS that spends.
I also point out in that article (and many others such as this one) that Democrats were primarily responsible for the disastrous policies that led to the 2008 collapse. They were basically completely responsible for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their reckless policies, and then utterly refused to allow any reforms that would have averted the ensuing disaster.
In an honest world, Bill Clinton wouldn’t get anywhere near as much credit as he does for the strong economy of the 1990s. And Republicans wouldn’t get anywhere near as much blame as they received for the 2008 collapse.
The problem is, our mainstream media advances one outright lie after another. And the lies become “truth” through sheer repetition.
Obama isn’t calling upon Bill Clinton to actually offer advice on how to turn the economy around; he’s calling Clinton in as a prop. Bill Clinton was forced to change his failed policies when the Republicans swept into power. Hopefully, that is exactly what will happen beginning this November.
Start Thinking Right 