Unread Lips
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted Monday, August 03, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Trustworthiness: The media savaged President George H.W. Bush for breaking his tax pledge. Will President Obama instead get a pass for breaking trust on middle-class taxes and medical care?
Could Obama have been elected president without promising not to raise taxes on the middle class? Would Americans have trusted him with the highest office in the land if he had proposed replacing all private health insurance with a Euro-style, socialistic, single-payer system?
As Ben Stein put it in his American Spectator diary, "The American people in their unimaginable kindness and trust . . . wanted so much to believe Barack Obama was somehow better and different from other ultra-leftists that they simply took him on faith."
Did the president shrewdly mislead Americans last year regarding his true intentions?
"I can make a firm pledge," he said in Dover, N.H., in September. "Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes." He vowed: "You will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime."
Over the weekend, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, when asked about new taxes on those with moderate incomes, told ABC that reducing the deficit is "going to be difficult, hard for us to do." And "we're not at the point yet where we're going to make a judgment about what it's going to take."
National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers, meanwhile, when asked Sunday about funding ObamaCare with such tax increases, responded that "it is never a good idea to absolutely rule things out, no matter what."
And the president, appearing before the American Medical Association in June, scoffed at the supposed "illegitimate concern" that "a public option is somehow a Trojan horse for a single-payer system."
But Breitbart TV this week posted an astonishing montage of clips prepared by the Naked Emperor News Web site, placing the president's assertion into serious doubt.
One was from a March 2007 Service Employees International Union (SEIU) health care forum, at which candidate Obama spoke of ending private coverage, stating that "I don't think we're gonna be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately"; it might take 10, 15 or 20 years, he said.
In another, from an AFL-CIO "civil, human and women's rights" conference in 2003, the future president described himself as "a proponent of single-payer universal health care coverage. . . . That's what I'd like to see."
Another clip featured Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., stating last week that "I think if we get a good public option, it could lead to single payer, and that's the best way to reach single payer."
It should not take alternative news sources to bring the president's multiple "read my lips" reversals to public awareness. Isn't it obvious that if such inconsistencies — suggesting calculated untruthfulness — had come from a Republican president, the establishment media would have unearthed them long, long ago?
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