It's Obama's Armageddon

Process for what he claims are dire automatic cuts was HIS IDEA!

Seems there are a lot of people who will believe anything Obama says no matter what. But even some of them are having a hard time accepting his latest scaremongering campaign blaming the GOP for dire consequences if he doesn't get another tax increase before the sequestration of automatic cuts kicks in next Friday.

The famous and widely respected Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward of Watergate fame has had enough of the lies. On Friday he published an article in the Post absolutely laying out the documentation proving the sequester was Obama's idea:

The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”

The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two days later.

“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”

The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.

Woodward goes on to point out that Lew, in his confirmation hearings to be Secretary of the Treasury repeated the falsehood. Lying to the Senate in your confirmation hearing. What a great way to get off to a good start as a member of the Obama cabinet. It's almost a prerequisite for the job!

Here's more:

Second, Lew testified during his confirmation hearing that the Republicans would not go along with new revenue in the portion of the deficit-reduction plan that became the sequester. Reinforcing Lew’s point, a senior White House official said Friday, “The sequester was an option we were forced to take because the Republicans would not do tax increases.”

In fact, the final deal reached between Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2011 included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the sequester in exchange for what the president was insisting on: an agreement that the nation’s debt ceiling would be increased for 18 months, so Obama would not have to go through another such negotiation in 2012, when he was running for reelection.

So when the president asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending cuts but also new revenue, he is moving the goal posts. [Mike: Has everyone forgotten his threat to veto any short term substitute?] His call for a balanced approach is reasonable, and he makes a strong case that those in the top income brackets could and should pay more. But that was not the deal he made.

So, not only is Obama and his top people lying to Congress and the American people they are breaking an earlier agreement that tax increases for this round were off the table along with a short term fix. But I suppose that since most people aren't paying attention to any of this all they will hear is Obama's class warfare and scare tactics.

Krauthammer: Sequester "Most Ridiculously Hyped Armageddon Since The Mayan Calendar"

Speaking of those scare tactics, those who are paying attention know it's all a big lie. Charles Krauthammer isn't the only talking head who has noticed that Obama's hype doesn't match reality:

JONATHAN KARL ABC NEWS: The spending cuts represent only a fraction of total federal spending. With the cuts, the federal government will spend about $15 billion more this year than it spent last year. Their impact won't be felt right away. The government must give employees 30 days notice before they can force them to take that one unpaid day off. That means you're really going to see the impact sometime in April.

BILL PLANTE CBS NEWS: People here admit that it could take several months for the public to really feel the pain.

MAJOR GARRETT CBS NEWS: Those terrible things, should they occur, won't happen rapidly. The public could say, maybe the president cried wolf.

The problem is that so few people will actually be well enough informed on this or any other big Washington issue to know who is lying. They'll just keep following Obama, the Pied Piper of more and more spending and ever higher taxes right off that "fiscal cliff" he said he would save us from!