Here are a bunch more. I do not pretend that this is an exhaustive list of the lies, flip-flops, failures, and dangerously incompetent things Barack Obama has done as president, but I do think it’s a good sampling.

Let’s get right to it:

While campaiging In 2008 Barack Obama decried adding $4 trillion to the debt over Bush’s 8 years* to get it to the lofty heights of $9 trillion as “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic.” Now, after fewer than four years of Obama the debt is $16 trillion.

Bonus second lie on this one is that also during the 2008 campaign Obama said he would not question the patriotism of anyone. He promised it. Ah, well.

Then there was the follow-on lie (or indication of gross incompetence, either way it ain’t attractive) that came once he was president: “I am pledging to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office.”

He was already president, so the economy was already in the tank, he already had grand designs for the Stimulus and a health care overhaul, and he already knew he was dealing with the war on terror and ongoing wars. Yet he still pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term. And yet, each of his years has had a deficit in excess of $1 trillion. One might use words like “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic” to describe such governance if one were so inclined.. At the very least, even if we cannot call it a “lie” because he really believed it at the time, it is gross incompetence.

That leads us to his claim that if he didn’t have the economy turned around in three years he’d be a “one-termer proposition“, which doesn’t jibe with his recent comment that it will take more than one term.

On the stimulus. It was sold to the American people largely on the strength of loads and loads of “shovel-ready jobs,” public works projects, we were informed, that were ready to go—designed, scheduled, entirely ready to go—but were merely waiting for the funding. The stimulus didn’t work and the economy isn’t turned around in part because those shovel-ready jobs “were not as, uh, as shovel-ready as we thought.” (A laugh line, apparently.)

He lamented gasoline prices, and they’ve gotten worse.

He said he would not allow lobbyists in his administration. He has.

And then there’s this video. You really should watch that one and just sit agape at how bold and sweeping his plans for government transparency were. They were inspiring, really, they were. The problem is that the promises didn’t seem to last beyond the point when the sound waves dissipated in the arena. He promised to let bills passed by Congress be online for five days before he signs them (he hasn’t); he promised to root out earmarks and porkbarrel corporate welfare (he’s done quite the opposite, and frequently); he promised to put meetings between lobbyists and policy makers online (hasn’t happened — they frequently meet in a nearby coffee shop to avoid all scrutiny); he promised to make it harder for lobbyist cash to influence government (his own campaign has the most lax standards possible, making it impossible to know if donations are coming from overseas or from people who have already maxed out their giving); and he promised to make government more open and transparent (The Fast and Furious coverup, the Benghazi coverup, and the process that cobbled together the healthcare law say otherwise).

And then there’s Libya.

It wasn’t the movie. They knew it wasn’t the movie from early on. At the very least the evidence that it most definitely *was* the movie, which was their claim for more than a week afterward, was tenuous at best. They continued to insist it was the movie until they simply could not any longer. And that sordid affair just keeps getting worse.

Eventually we found out that they knew within 24 hours that it was an assault by organized terrorists. We found out that Stevens had been requesting beefed up security in Benghazi, to no avail. Then we found out there never was a protest before the attack that simply “turned violent.” Next we find out that the administration knew within 2 hours of the start of the 7-hour attack that the White House had information about the nature of the attack and that a terrorist group had claimed responsibility. Today it comes to light that the CIA guys on the ground requested military backup while it was happening, and was denied 3 times, leaving Stevens and Smith to fend for themselves, and forcing Wood and Doherty to disobey orders in order to go to the rescue of their fellow Americans under attack.

The question becomes, at what point do people begin to recognize that President Obama is a pathological liar, grossly (and now fatally) incompetent, or both?

———–

*If you go back and check, more than half of the debt Bush racked up was after the Dems had taken Congress in 2006. The Dems controlled the purse strings in the House of Representatives, so while Bush’s presidency did add a whole lot to the national debt the congressional Dems share the blame on that one.

• The Inspector General reported that, contra Eric Holder’s assertions, top Justice officials in Washington *did* have damning knowledge of Fast and Furious, the gun-walking scandal that has left at least one American law enforcement official, and hundreds of Mexicans, dead.
• Our ambassador to Libya, who was barely guarded, was murdered in Benghazi in a coordinated assault; and our embassy in Cairo was breached in an attack by a mob that we pretty much knew were coming.
  • Despite the warnings we had, which the President didn’t hear since he had skipped so many intelligence briefings, our government insisted it was all caused by a film trailer on YouTube.
• A filmmaker was taken from his home by a cadre of sheriff’s deputies for producing a film that the government didn’t like (please, drop the pretense that the midnight visit, on that day, from that many deputies, surrounded by TV cameras, downtown to answer questions from the FBI, was strictly because of a probation violation).
• Our embassies have come under attack throughout the Middle East and are seeing loud protests in Europe and Asia.
  • While this was happening, the President of the United States was hopping a jet to a fundraiser in Las Vegas, avoiding a meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister (he later changed course, after being duly embarrassed publicly), and prepping for an appearance on Letterman.
    • During this appearance the head of the executive branch of the federal government played dumb about the size of he federal debt. He didn’t lie, precisely, when Dave asked if it were around $10 trillion, but “$16 trillion or something like that” or even, “more than that, Dave, and that’s too much,” would have been an acceptable answer.
• Our military has temporarily suspended conducting joint operations with Afghan forces because, well, the Afghanis have this tendency to shoot our guys.
  • Sidenote: more than twice as many Americans have died in Afghanistan in the three-plus years since Obama took office than did in the seven years we were there before he took office.
• We found out that Obamacare will cost 6 million taxpayers an additional $7 billion in taxes in 2016. And it rises to $8 billion the following year.
• A video has emerged that shows Barack Obama committing himself to the idea of wealth redistribution. (Not that this is news, but it bears repeating.)
• Obama held a fundraiser at a place with a $280,000 sculpture constructed with golden champagne bottles worth $300 each. Because nothing serves to underscore your opponent’s out-of-touch richness like raising money next to a stack of golden champagne bottles.
• Emails secured under a FOIA request have proved that officials at the Department of Justice colluded with Media Matters for America to target and discredit journalists who were covering scandals at the DOJ

But none of that appears to be as important as Mitt Romney’s 47% comment.

Now. Romney’s comment has plenty of problems—the 47% of Americans who do not pay income taxes cannot be uniformly characterized as lazy moochers who will all vote for Obama no matter what. Likewise, the remaining 53% are not all perfectly virtuous, industrious, assured Romney voters.

I’m not defending the comment. It was tin-eared. It was wrong. I wish he hadn’t said it and I wish he didn’t think it. Even if there is some truth to it as well: there is, statistically speaking, about 47% of the voting public that will definitely vote for Obama. Perhaps a little more, perhaps a little less, but right around there. That 47% definitely has some overlap with the 47% who do not pay income taxes, but not perfect coincidence. The task of political campaigns is to identify who is in that group who are unpersuadable and not waste resources on them. So from an electoral perspective he wasn’t wholly wrong: he doesn’t need to worry about them, for good reason. But I still wish he hadn’t said it.

That said, I’m wondering why that comment has been *so* dominant in the news cycle with all these other things going on. Perhaps it’s a rhetorical question. I’m sure some of our august commenters will have ideas.

You got it: the world is burning and I'm yukking it up with Dave and hob-nobbing with Jay-Z and Beyonce!