Obama Publicly Demogogues Lobbyists While Going To Bed With Them Behind Closed Doors

A berry, berry good article detailing Barack Obama’s pathological dishonesty and simultaneous demagoguery regarding lobbyists:

Obama’s Lobbyist Slams Masks Big K Street Payday
Posted on January 29, 2010 By Warner Todd Huston

In his State of the Union speech, the president puffed up his chest, fixed his Mr. scornful face, and once again pulled out the populist’s handbook to bash those evil, monstrous lobbyists.

Obama mentioned lobbyists seven times in his address and in every case they were used as a scapegoat to explain away Washington’s inability to get one thing or another done.

Obama promised — again and for the thousandth time — to “end the outsized influence of lobbyists” in Washington. He then praised himself for excluding lobbyists from jobs in his administration and he proposed even more limits on them.

This attack on lobbyists is cathartic and makes for great populist boilerplate, of course, but there isn’t much truth in Obama’s attack on them because the fact is K Street — the D.C. street where many lobbying firms are located — has made more money off the Obama Administration than from any previous president.

And Obama has been pretty blatant about ignoring the obvious disconnect between his populist harangues against lobbyists and his coddling and sidling up to them. Obama’s big paydays to lobbyists at nearly every level has been nothing short of breathtaking. It has been like this since day one.

One is tempted to call the president a prevaricator on the issue.

Obama didn’t even let his TelePrompters get cold before he was snuggling up to lobbyists. The Hill reported that the very next day after Obama attacked the evils of lobbying in the SOTU speech, his administration invited a bunch of them to private briefings.

The Hill quoted one lobbyist’s frustration with Obama’s habit of talking out of both sides of his mouth where lobbyists are concerned. “Bash lobbyists, then reach out to us. Bash lobbyists [while] I have received four Democratic invitations for fundraisers,” The Hill reported this lobbyist as saying.

Meanwhile, back in December, Politico reported that Lobbyists were on pace for a record year. It was estimated that lobbyists would spend $3.3 billion lobbying the federal government in 2009.

“We’ve never had as good a year,” said one lobbyist whose shop deals mostly with financial services and health care issues. “It’s been a tremendously busy year, and it’s going to keep getting that way,” the lobbyist said, noting that both health care and financial reform will remain active as congressional action moves from drafting legislation to implementation to the inevitable fixes.

Never had as good a year? I thought Obama was the veritable Jack the Lobbyist killer?

During the SOTU, Obama wanted brownie points because he “excluded lobbyists” from important jobs in his administration. This has been a longtime refrain from this president. Even as he began his term last year he claimed he was instituting the “strictest ethics rules ever applied” to lobbyists in Washington. The truth, however, shows that his back patting does not quite ring true. As early as February 2 of 2009 it was becoming clear that quite a few lobbyists had, indeed, been hired into the Obama Administration. It was so obvious that Politico began tracking the number of lobbyists that Obama was hiring — and waiving his new “rules” for. Politico discovered at least a dozen had been hired by the end of January, 2009.

The lobbyist’s big payday didn’t end there. In March Chris Frates reported that former Democratic legislative aides were “hot commodities” for lobbying firms as Obama’s new rules became increasingly dense and hard to understand. By May 30 Roll Call was reporting (subscription required) that the Obama Administration was lifting some of its bans on lobbyists so that they could get their hooks more easily into the stimulus spending. Last August Obama even “gave a seat at the table” of healthcare negotiations to a former Congressman turned healthcare lobbyist.

If I can paraphrase Chico Escuela, former faux baseball great, the truth is that Obama has been berry, berry good to lobbyists. So much for the hopinchange and the end of lobbyist’s influence in the era of Obama.

Even the very left leaning MSNBC was easily able to find dishonesty in seven major areas of Obama’s misstatement of the union speech.  The AP points out Obama’s prevarications in eight areas of their own.  The Conservative American goes to town, finding 23 untruths in Obama’s speech.

Obama demonized the Supreme Court in that speech, which was a massive breach of etiquette.  The Supreme Court Justices showed up out of courtesy and out of respect for the three branches of federal government; not to be denounced in a forum in which they had no chance to respond.  You can go back to every single state of the union speech since George Washington’s, and not find such an attack.  And it was largely based on lies: Obama said that foreign corporations would be able to buy elections thanks to the SCOTUS ruling — which is simply patently untrue.

You can’t help but think our “constitutional scholar” president would know that.  Which means that Obama’s slander was not a simple mistake: it was transparent demagoguery.

As was Obama’s constant blaming of George Bush for every problem under the sun.  Obama has long-since worn out his “The buck stops with George Bush” paperweight.  It’s long past time he took responsibility for his own presidency.

I’m sick of Obama’s lies.  I’m sick of this man who promised he would be the greatest unifier in history being the worst polarizer in history.  I’m sick of this deceiver congratulating himself for his “transparency” while holding closed-door meeting after closed-door meeting with unions, lobbyists, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies – not to mention all the Democrat politicians who negotiated sweetheart deals for their own districts at the expense of the rest of the nation.

And I’m even sicker of the mainstream media’s refusal to report the truth.

Fox News – the network that the Obama administration has repeatedly demonized – is now far and away the most trusted name in news.  Perhaps the fact that honest media players like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal are thriving while the lamestream media slips into bankruptcy will finally force these propagandists to change their tunes and start reporting the truth.