Rush has been on this one for three days now...and here's where it began...
The Right Sphere: Well, it looks like we may finally know what actually happened during last year’s heated debate on the debt ceiling and spending. Remember after things took a turn for the worse, President Obama said it was the GOP who wouldn’t get behind the deal and Boehner has long held that the President is the one who walked away from a deal? Looks like Boehner was right. From Politico:
Eight months after deficit talks between the nation’s top two elected officials collapsed, a 4,600-word inside-the-room narrative by The Washington Post on Sunday — the first of several sweeping accounts in the works — paints the Obama administration as walking away from a nearly done agreement with Boehner. And when the president eventually came around and wanted to cut a deal, Boehner said it was too late.
In short, the Post piece bolsters the Boehner team’s narrative that it was Obama who got cold feet and became unwilling to strike a grand bargain to fix the nation’s finances.
“The story makes it clear that the facts are as we’ve always described them,” said Michael Steel, Boehner’s spokesman, in a Sunday interview. “The speaker showed a great deal of courage by putting $800 billion in revenues through tax reform on the table, and the White House couldn’t close the deal. They moved the goal posts and refused to get serious.”
The Politico piece also goes on to say why President Obama walked away from the deal:
But in the Post’s version of events, Obama is portrayed as worrying he would face a backlash from the left if he pulled the trigger. And former Obama chief of staff Bill Daley provided surprising, on-the-record support of the GOP’s insistence that the president deserves blame for losing his nerve.
Daley said the White House privately fretted that Democrats would go ballistic if the president agreed to $800 billion in new tax revenues when some Republican senators had signaled willingness to go along with as much as $2 trillion.
Commentary Magazine reminds us of the original lie...
Last summer, a brief stir was caused when a book published by New York Times reporter Janny Scott uncovered an uncomfortable fact about President Obama: He had been lying about his mother’s health insurance problems. During the 2008 campaign and throughout the subsequent debate over his signature health care legislation, the president used his mother’s experience as a cancer patient fighting to get coverage to pay for treatment for what her insurer said was a pre-existing condition as an emotional argument to sway skeptics. But as Scott discovered during the course of writing her biography of Anne Dunham, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, it turned out that her correspondence showed that “the 1995 dispute concerned a Cigna disability insurance policy and that her actual health insurer had apparently reimbursed most of her medical expenses without argument.”
...and The Fact Checker politely nails the lie permeated once again, now in the Tom Hanks narrated Obama re-election propaganda film, “The Road We’ve Traveled”.
We think there are few viewers of this film who would watch this sequence and conclude that Dunham was involved in anything but a fight over health-insurance coverage. ...The filmmakers must have known they had a problem with this story or else they would have recounted it as Obama had done in the 2008 campaign, using phrases such as “pre-existing conditions,” “health insurance,” and “treatment.” Instead, they arranged the quotes and images to leave a misleading impression of what really happened.
Fearing more backlash during a campaign year from rising gas prices, Obama makes another effort to fool the general public...
Fox News: The presidential campaign's political war of words over gas prices and who will lower them will surely escalate as President Obama hits the road next week for a series of energy-related speeches.
Perhaps the most notable among them will be a visit to the Cushing, Oklahoma-area, where Canadian company TransCanada is set to install an oil pipeline that will begin there and reach the Gulf of Mexico. The president will make remarks at a storage yard holding pipes that will be used for the pipeline's construction.
The president's visit appears to be intended to be an exclamation point for a White House constantly defending the president as pro-U.S. drilling.
It will likely take more convincing for many in the GOP, however, given the fierce debate with the president over that same company's request for an oil pipeline that would traverse the US-Canada border. The issue became mired in politics and resulted in the president's rejection of the plan.
"There is only a minor, routine permit needed for this leg of the project. Only a desperate administration would inject the President of the United States into this trivial matter. The President's attempt to take credit for a pipeline he blocked and personally lobbied Congress against is staggering in its disingenuousness. This portion of the pipeline is being built in spite of the President, not because of him."
In other words, this was already going to happen. Furthermore, it only provides a more direct mode between two neighboring states (Oklahoma & Texas), in addition to truck or train transport. This is nowhere near the magnitude, in resources or jobs, of the pipeline that should have been developed with our neighbors to the North (from Canada to Texas).
Meanwhile, The Hill reports, "Top executives with Oklahoma-based oil-and-gas companies are greeting President Obama’s upcoming visit with a push for approval of the entire Keystone XL pipeline, not just the Oklahoma-to-Texas portion that the White House is pledging to expedite." Good luck, guys...but everyone should recognize that this current expedition is just another election year ploy from our liar-in-chief.
