Obama's latest excuse: "We didn't know how bad it was," via Politico...
President Barack Obama said Tuesday he wishes he knew the full extent of the economic crisis when he took office, if only so he could have let Americans know just how tough the coming years would be.
"I think we understood that it was bad, but we didn’t know how bad it was,” Obama said in an interview with KIRO in Seattle. "I think I could have prepared the American people for how bad this was going to be, had we had a sense of that."
I'm calling BS on this one. With the constant reminder that 'this is the worst recession since the Great Depression', the Obama administration steamrolled ahead with their statist budget-busting (or budgetless, rather) agenda, and with little concern of how much more they'd drive up the debt. I'm not alone in this call...
Lonely Conservative says, "It appears that the president has a very short memory. He hadn’t even taken office when he was warning of disastrous consequences if a stimulus package wasn’t passed. He got everything he wanted and the economy got worse. Now he wants to do more of the same. If he gets his way, what do you think will happen?"
Here's Joseph Lawler's comments from the American Spectator:
"If the five million green jobs Obama promised had materialized, the economy wouldn't be as bad as it is today. If the stimulus -- including Cash for Clunkers and the homebuyer tax credit -- had worked, the economy wouldn't be as bad as it is today.
And so on. Obama is the one who claimed the technocratic ability to control economic outcomes, and now he is saying that those abilities were thwarted because the outcomes were worse than he thought they would be."
And here's Stephen Hayes comments at the Weekly Standard:
So was Barack Obama surprised by the seriousness of the economic problems in 2008, as he now claims? In a word: No.
On September 28, 2008, in the first head-to-head debate with John McCain, Obama said: “We are going through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.” He called it “a defining moment in our history.” A post on the Obama administration’s transition page said that the United States “faces its most serious economic crisis since the great depression.”
Why would Obama say something so easily refuted? Perhaps he’s simply hoping the media won’t call him on it – a reasonable expectation. Or maybe he’s hoping for the opposite – that the media will call him on his current mendacity and, as a consequence, remind voters just how bad the economy was when he came to office. Who knows?
Either way, the White House’s current claim that it was unaware of the depth of the economic problems is not true.
In other words, no one's buying your BS, Mr. President. You absolutely knew how bad it was, but your agenda was more important than repairing the economy, the true health of the nation.
