New York Times with Obama to the Bitter End
By Kim Zigfeld
American Thinker
The Obama administration is coming apart at the seams, with only the most recklessly dishonest of its partisans, among them New York Times reporters, left to defend it. The devil, you know, is in the details.
On September 13, 2010, for instance, First Lady Michelle Obama gave a speech to the National Restaurant Association convention in Washington, D.C. In it, she called for a healthier diet for children and condemned, among other things, the overuse of cheese therein:
<<< It starts with offering healthier options designed specifically for kids. And today, no matter what kind of restaurant you visit -- whether it's Italian, French, Mexican, American -- most kids' menus look pretty much the same. And trust me, we've seen a lot of them. One local survey found that 90 percent of those menus include mac and cheese -- our children's favorite; 80 percent includes chicken fingers; 60 includes burgers or cheeseburgers. >>>
But if you Google "Michelle Obama mac and cheese," you will not find her speech prominently referenced. Far more popularly associated with this phrase is a recipe page from the Chicago Sun-Times which reprints the First Lady's own recipe for the dish. The dish calls for the addition of four cups of cheese and a cup of heavy cream.
If you look a little harder, you'll find that Mrs. Obama's husband is a pretty big fan of cheese, too. So much so, in fact, that his Department of Agriculture helped Domino's Pizza develop a $12-million marketing campaign to tout its adding 40% more cheese to its pizzas -- failing to mention that one slice from such a new-and-improved Obama Pie could contain two-thirds of an entire day's recommended allowance for saturated fat.
With the Obamas, you see, it's "do as we say, not as we do."
That's if you can figure out what Obama is saying, of course. As even arch-liberal Obamaphile Frank Rich of the Times admits, "[t]he plot of Obama's presidency has been harder to follow than 'Inception.' The president's travails are not merely a 'communications problem.' They're also a governance problem."
But it goes without saying that there are still a number of hardcore Obama fanatics who've drunk so much Kool-Aid that their skin glows orange. And any number can, in fact, still be found at the Times, despite the paper's own contents.
The same day the New York Times wrote about the Domino's incident, for instance, the number-two most-e-mailed story on its website was an op-ed by Timothy Egan, a die-hard Times reporter for nearly two decades. There's no blood left in this fellow's veins -- only Obam-Aid. The piece was entitled "How Obama Saved Capitalism and Lost the Midterms."
As Egan would have it, the American people are either morons or communists. They either don't realize that Obama is a committed capitalist just like them and is responsible for preventing the takeover of socialism in the USA, or they do realize it and despise Obama for his treachery against egalitarianism. This is what happens to you when you spend two decades employed by the Gray Lady reporting "facts." Brain rot sets in.
Egan begins his tirade by lying. He writes, "The presidency of George W. Bush produced the worst stock market decline of any president in history. If you needed a loan to buy a house or stay in business, private sector borrowing was dead when he handed over power."
Egan's own source exposes his lie. Too bad he didn't, apparently, go as far as to read it. It clearly states, "In percentage terms, Bush's 21.8 percent Dow drop [was] the worst showing since an 83.2 percent decline under President Herbert Hoover, whose term included the 1929 stock-market crash." In other words, the Bush decline was not the worst of any president in history. It was only one quarter of what occurred under Hoover. What's more, many people borrowed money and bought houses in the first quarter of 2009, when Bush handed over power. Borrowing was not "dead." Down, yes; dead, no.
Then Egan lied some more. He claimed Obama is due credit for producing a stock market return of 77% on the NASDAQ and 48% on the S&P between January 20, 2009 and November 2, 2010. Yet he then ascribes the basis for this credit as follows: "The banking system was resuscitated by $700 billion in bailouts started by Bush (a fact unknown by a majority of Americans), and finished by Obama, with help from the Federal Reserve." So it seems that Bush and the Fed (run by a Bush appointee reconfirmed by Obama, Egan fails to acknowledge) deserve some of the credit after all. And what specific new policy did Obama spearhead which accounted for some of this stock market claw-back? Egan did not care to say.
What's more, Egan's statement is utterly dishonest at its most fundamental level -- so much so that it almost cries out for some type of criminal charge. The unemployment rate has remained horrifyingly constant because virtually all the economic "progress" made by Obama is an illusion, coming solely as the result of massive, unprecedented borrowing and spending by government that has resulted in horrifying deficits because tax revenues are at record lows due to continuing anemic production. It is this sleight of hand that was utterly repudiated by the voters in the last election, yet Egan totally ignored it.
Instead, Egan just kept on lying. He claimed that Obama could have nationalized the banking system but chose not to, and he chose to flout the urgings of many in his own party who wanted to see capitalism collapse. But the recent election returns show with absolute clarity that Obama never had that kind of mandate, nor did Obama ever suggest he had such a plan.
Egan's recklessly dishonest propaganda tract attracted more than five hundred breathless comments from Times readers, each one more effusive in its praise of Obama and its condemnation of American idiots than the last. Yet the Times' own pages are full of people who know the facts.
Warren Buffet recently wrote a thank-you note to "Uncle Sam" for averting a catastrophic financial meltdown. When he named names among Sam's minions who deserved credit for doing so, Barack Obama's was nowhere to be found. George W. Bush, however, was front and center.
Contrast that with Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman recently excoriating Obama for his lack of leadership. When Buffet and Krugman agree, perhaps a feverishly blind and partisan New York Times reporter is mistaken.
One must wonder with some trepidation, though, how many other Egans are currently reporting "facts" for the Gray Lady.
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