11/25/16

Obama Attempts to Distort His Legacy

By: Roger Aronoff | Accuracy in Media

The election of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on November 8 was not only a rejection of Hillary Clinton, based on her trustworthiness and her legal and ethical problems, it was also clearly a repudiation of Democratic policymaking, with Trump promising to eliminate or revise a number of Barack Obama’s signature achievements. But, speaking to the press in his first press conference after the election, President Obama maintained that he is leaving the White House and America in as good a shape as possible.

“As I told my staff, we should be very proud that their work has already ensured that when we turn over the keys, the car’s in pretty good shape,” Obama told the press on November 14. He then pointed to the jobs market, poverty levels, health insurance, and curbing carbon emissions. “…[M]y goal is on January 21, America’s in the strongest position possible and hopefully there’s an opportunity for the next president to build on that,” he said.

The press asked Obama questions about Trump’s temperament, rather than calling out Obama’s narrative that America is somehow better off because of his leadership. This has been a problem throughout Obama’s eight years in office. Too many in the media dare not challenge Obama’s claims of great policy successes, or of being transparent, and having a scandal free administration. They want instead, it seems, to be liked by him, to keep their access to him, plus they generally support his agenda. So they rarely contradict him.

For example, we have long pointed out that citing the falling unemployment rate creates a falsely optimistic view of the economy. Gallup argues that real unemployment is at 9.5 percent, not the 4.9 percent that the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported. “For example, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does not count a person who desires work as unemployed if he or she is not working and has stopped looking for work over the past four weeks,” states Gallup.

However, even the higher unemployment number downplays the seriousness of the current job situation. The U.S. labor participation rate is currently at its lowest levels since the 1970s. The labor participation rate is an estimate of the share of the population actively engaged in the labor market, either employed or currently looking for work. Nearly 15 million people have left the workforce since President Obama came to office in 2009, bringing the total up from about 80 million people to approximately 95 million. Those people are no longer counted when calculating the unemployment rate, rendering the 4.9 percent rate a very poor indicator of how the economy is doing.

“The incoming administration doesn’t have to put out a huge number of fires,” said Obama at the press conference, alluding to the economic crisis that he faced upon taking office. “And that’s a testament to the tremendous work that my team has done over the last eight years,” he said.

President Obama has repeatedly claimed that he has cut the deficit. During his 2016 State of the Union address, he claimed that his policies had cut “our deficits by almost three-quarters.” However, as the Center for Individual Freedom points out, Obama’s “worst legacy, one that remains grotesquely underreported by the ‘watchdog’ mainstream media” is “by far the worst deficit record in U.S. history.”

“Over an eight-year period, that amounts to an accumulated $2 trillion under [George W.] Bush, or an average of approximately $260 billion,” states CFIF. When campaigning for the presidency in 2008, Obama called it “unpatriotic” that Bush had taken the national debt from approximately $5 trillion to $9 trillion. Today our national debt is just under $20 trillion after eight years of Obama in the White House. Far from leaving the United States in good shape, Obama is leaving it in debt-ridden shambles.

Trump has promised to roll back one of Obama’s key legislative achievements—Obamacare—which Obama claims has made the “uninsured rate” the “lowest level on record.” But, as we have reported, having insurance with large deductibles and skyrocketing premiums has hardly equated to more Americans receiving care.

The press has systematically failed to ask key questions about policies that are meant to bolster Obama’s legacy, refusing to call attention to Obamacare’s faults or expose the unsigned Iran “deal” as an enormous hoax. So it is of little surprise that the mainstream media also allowed Obama to claim the mantle of “scandal-free.”

“I am very proud of the fact that we will, knock on wood, leave this administration without significant scandal,” Obama told the press. “…I will put this administration against any administration in history.”

The press considered few, if any, of the major Obama scandals—the IRS targeting scandal, Benghazi, the Veterans Administration scandal, Fast & Furious, ransom cash sent to the Iranians—as real scandals. That is because the press has made excuse after excuse for Obama’s mismanagement or deliberate malfeasance, perennially ignoring and downplaying his scandals.

President Obama’s administration has also been the least transparent administration in history, fighting against Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to keep government business secret, and systematically targeting journalists who print leaked information. Obama has gone after those compromising national security, unless the person misusing classified information is Hillary Clinton.

Obama’s claim that he is scandal free has been echoed by the token conservative at The New York Times, David Brooks, as well as Obama’s former senior advisor, David Axelrod. As I previously argued, “The question of presidential legacy, however, revolves not around a president’s demeanor but rather his policy successes and failures, as well as his character….These scandals, and the ensuing cover-ups, have stained Obama’s reputation less publicly than in previous administrations not because of their minor importance, but rather because a corrupt media is willing to overlook massive amounts of evidence of malfeasance to benefit their allies in the Democratic Party.”

The Christian Science Monitor disagreed with my—and others’—use of the word “corrupt” to describe the media.

The Islamic State (ISIS) has expanded from JV status, as Obama told the New Yorker in early 2014, to operating in more than two dozen countries. “Since declaring its caliphate in June 2014, the self-proclaimed Islamic State has conducted or inspired more than 140 terrorist attacks in 29 countries other than Iraq and Syria,” according to CNN, “where its carnage has taken a much deadlier toll. Those attacks have killed at least 2,043 people and injured thousands more.”

There are half a million people who have been killed in Syria, which Nick Kristof of The New York Times calls “Obama’s worst mistake.”

Another part of his legacy is that Obama has left the Democrat Party in disarray. The media were assuring us that Trump was about to take the Republican Party down with him, and that it was on the verge of extinction. But, in fact, Republicans now dominate at the combined state and federal level like never before in modern times. As a result, Democrats are on the verge of choosing Rep. Keith Ellison (MN), a radical left-winger who supports the Muslim Brotherhood-front group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and who has been a harsh critic of America’s ally Israel, as the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Is that the lesson that Democrats learned from this last election?

Roger Aronoff

Roger Aronoff is the Editor of Accuracy in Media, and a member of the Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi. He can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Roger Aronoff.

12/13/14

Media Struggle to Save Obama, Not the Country

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

A story in Thursday’s Washington Post about establishing Obama’s “foreign policy legacy” goes a long way toward explaining why the Senate Democrats and the media have been trashing the Bush administration’s very productive enhanced interrogation program as “torture.”

Titled “Obama’s foreign policy plans collide with wars abroad and politics at home,” the story by Greg Jaffe and Juliet Eilperin made it clear that CIA director John Brennan’s defense of the agency had thwarted Obama’s plan “to move the country beyond what he [Obama] has described as the fearful excesses of the post-9/11 era.” While Obama has banned what he calls “torture,” he has failed to close the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (Gitmo), established by the Bush administration to house terrorist suspects. Other problems outlined in the Post article include the continuing war in Afghanistan and a new war in Iraq and Syria against ISIS.

What Obama calls “torture” is what the media call “torture.” If you needed any more proof of a pro-Obama media bias, just look at how regularly the personalities on CNN, supposedly more moderate than MSNBC, have adopted his terms of the debate. This is the media’s way of saying that Obama was right and that it’s good he has banned this way of getting information from terrorists. Never mind that Obama’s way of murder through drone strikes is decidedly more “harsh.” Bush grilled them, Obama kills them.

Without a foreign policy “legacy” of some kind, Obama’s two terms will look like a failure and the Democrats will be doomed in 2016.

Domestically, his only real “accomplishment” at this point looks like the Eric Holder policy of suspending enforcement of federal marijuana laws. This will be a “legacy” of interest to fellow pothead members of Obama’s “Choom Gang” in Hawaii, and the emerging cannabis industry. But it’s doubtful most people will appreciate this historic development.

Obama’s signature “accomplishment” in domestic affairs, Obamacare, has been exposed as a massive fraud and deception. According to a new CBS News poll, race relations have dramatically deteriorated under the first black president. It’s true he is moving forward unconstitutionally with amnesty for illegal aliens. But House Republicans are promising to do something about that next year. The economy is still lackluster. So foreign policy is really his only hope of doing anything positive, and he’s running into the facts of life there, too. The terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans is only one part of his legacy. The legacy of that attack hurts both Obama and Hillary Clinton, his former Secretary of State and likely 2016 Democratic candidate. And it’s doubtful that an Iran with nuclear weapons would qualify as a positive foreign policy legacy for Obama, either.

One can suppose that Obama will try to claim he was the one who got Osama bin Laden. But Brennan made it clear on Thursday that the enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) from the Bush-era played a role in killing the terrorist kingpin. Brennan said, “It is our considered view that the detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques provided information that was useful and was used in the ultimate operation to go against bin Laden. Again, intelligence information from the individuals who were subjected to EITs provided information that was used in that. Again, I am not going to attribute that to the use of the EITs; just going to state as a matter of fact, the information that they provided was used.”

What Brennan is saying is that he cannot pinpoint with any degree of accuracy that a particular form of interrogation led to the terrorists divulging certain information. That’s because nobody was taking precise notes on when terrorist X or Y said one thing or another at any particular time in the interrogation process. But the record is clear that the EITs contributed to the terrorists getting to the point where they decided to spill their guts.

CNN, which is increasingly trying to sound like MSNBC, headlined the Brennan news conference as “Brennan: No Proof Harsh Tactics Led to Useful Info.” How can his phrase that “intelligence information from the individuals who were subjected to EITs provided information that was used” to get bin Laden be interpreted as “proof” that it wasn’t useful? CNN was lying. CNN gave the opposite impression of what he actually said.

Before he held his news conference, Brennan met with Obama and was probably instructed to finesse his language somewhat so that a certain amount of ambiguity could be left in some minds. CNN and other media tried to take advantage of that for Obama’s sake. Still, Brennan’s statement was a vindication of the Bush policy. That means that any attempt by Obama to claim credit for the death of bin Laden will ring hollow. There goes his foreign policy legacy.

These facts help explain the desperation of the media and why they have adopted Obama’s rhetoric on “torture.” They must figure that if they use the term often enough, many people will assume that the techniques were, in fact, torture. In order to drive that point home, Andrea Mitchell of NBC News used the Brennan news conference to mention some of the techniques. She referred to “waterboarding, near drowning, slamming people against the wall, hanging them in stress positions, confining them in small boxes or coffins, threatening them with drills, waving guns around their head as they are blindfolded…”

She could have mentioned the horrible deaths suffered by those in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon or Flight 93 on 9/11. She could have mentioned the 9/11 jumpers—the people who jumped from the towers rather than be burned to death.

But Mitchell didn’t think it was worth mentioning any of that.

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper have been fixated by a phrase in the Senate Democratic report on “rectal rehydration.” Tapper called it a form of torture. In fact, it’s a medical procedure to keep the terrorists alive when they resist sustenance. Would Tapper have preferred that the terrorists be allowed to die? Then the program would have come in for even stronger criticism. This goes to show that all of this discussion is just another attempt to tarnish the Bush presidency and make Obama look good by comparison. Tapper said he was dumbfounded by the talk of “rectal rehydration.”

No, he was just dumb.

Obama, the Senate Democrats and the media look foolish and unpatriotic. It looks like they are deliberately playing into the hands of America’s enemies in order to score partisan political points. Obama has abandoned proven techniques to get information from, and about, terrorists and has adopted in their place a policy of killing the terrorists and their families through drone strikes that don’t yield any intelligence data at all. How on earth does this make any sense?

From an objective point of view, does a Hellfire missile hitting a human being look more or less “harsh” than waving a gun over someone’s head, turning on a drill, or pouring water on a terrorist?

The answer should be obvious to anyone with half a brain. But most of our media are so determined to save Obama’s presidency that they can’t think clearly.

The Post and other media are desperate to construct a “legacy” for America’s first black president. The real concern should be saving the country, not Obama’s presidency.