Just like breathing

It has been pretty obvious for quite some time, to anyone paying attention, that this President is an extraordinarily mendacious fellow.  Most of the lies didn't matter to people, they were too far removed from their existence to be of any consequence.  "If you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance," is entirely different kind of lie.  Cancellation notices can't be spun.  Lies and lies about lies and lies about lies about lies just make the matter worse.

Andrew Klavan has a video and some thoughts to share:

It is now apparent to any honest observer that Obama is a rank incompetent too arrogant and foolish to alter his political philosophy even after reality has proven it false. As his record at the time of his original candidacy should have warned us, he has no business in the Oval Office. He simply isn’t up for the job.

And what is extra tragicomical about Obama’s spectacular failure is that so many of the journalists who cover him are ALSO content to have him play rather than be the president — just as they themselves are content to play at heroically helping the poor and minorities even as their left-wing policies make the poor even poorer and the marginalized more marginalized still.

The reason for this is that both Obama and many of our journalists were trained in the post-modern academy where they were taught that there is no such thing as moral truth but only culturally inculcated narratives. In such a world, the moral narrative that can be drummed into the head of the populace is the truth that wins. Convincing people that a good has been achieved is the same as achieving it.

Roger L. Simon had this to offer:

I suspect that Obama’s core belief — his key religious value, if you will — is an American form of taqiyya — the Muslim dictate that it is permissible to lie to non-believers for the preservation of Islam. He believes in left-wing taqiyya. (Ironically, taqiyya is largely Shiite and Obama wishes to negotiate with Shiite Iran, masters of the lie.)

Now I do not think for a second that Obama is a Muslim any more than I think he is a Christian. He is a typical postmodern agnostic who only goes to church — and then rarely — for political purposes. But he grew up in the Islamic world in the midst of the psychological climate of taqiyya, with preservation of the group taking precedence over even the hint of democracy. And that climate harmonized completely with his other influences — anti-imperialism augmented by Alinksyite methods, themselves anti-democratic.

He never had a moral basis for honesty. Lying, from the Choom Gang through Reverend Wright and beyond, was his lifestyle. And he had the consolation that he was lying for a better good. No one ever told him otherwise. If that goes on for long enough, you lose contact with truth. It becomes almost a non-existent phenomenon, an irrelevancy.
In a very real way, Obama’s confluence of influences has replaced traditional religion and become a religion — with everything he does based on faith, but not a faith that has anything to do with God.

VDH weighs in  here

What is the common denominator of the Obama administration’s serial scandals — the Justice Department’s spying on AP, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, the NSA surveillance, the lies about Benghazi and the ACA — and much of the White House damage-control rhetoric? In a word: the advancement of postmodern notions of justice at the expense of traditional truth.
 
By the 1980s, in law schools, university social-science departments, and the humanities in general, the old relativist idea of Plato’s noble lies was given a new French facelift. Traditional morality and ethics were dismissed as arbitrary constructs, predicated on privileged notions of race, class, and gender. The new moral architecture did not rely on archaic abidance by the niceties of “truth,” which simply reinforced traditional oppressive hierarchies.

Instead, social justice by definition transcended the sham of traditional ideas of truth and falsity. The true became the advocacy of fairness, while the real lie was the reactionary adherence to a set of oppressive norms. All this was faculty-lounge fluff, but soon it filtered out into the larger culture.

Not to be outdone the point is made by  Daniel Greenfield: see this

If You Don’t Trust Americans to Choose Their Own Health Insurance…

… Why would you trust them enough to tell them the truth that they won’t be able to choose their own health insurance?
The elitism implicit in progressivism makes deceit mandatory.

If Americans are little more than apes who can sorta be trusted to drive cars, but not to pick them out, then they aren’t advanced enough to be told the truth. And indeed that is the rationale that was advanced for Obama’s plan lie.
It’s behind the resistance to the Upton Keep Your Plan Act.

If Americans are too stupid to know what’s good for them, then you have to lie to them and lie to them some more. When they lose their plans and get outraged, tell them that their plans were bad substandard scam plans.
Progressives lie casually because they don’t view the people whom they are lying to as being advanced enough and evolved enough to be worthy of the truth.

And if they did believe the American people deserved the truth and deserved to make their own choices, they wouldn’t lie to them.
That’s what this conflict is really about. That’s what the clash between Socialism and the Free Market, between slavery and freedom is about.
The left doesn’t feel bad about lying, because it doesn’t view the people it is lying to as having the same degree of personhood, intelligence and legal rights as they do.

Like I said, the prez is particularly mendacious.


More about the rhetoric here 

Except for diehard, "true believer" progressives, it has finally begun to dawn on Americans that ObamaCare was sold to us under false pretenses. But the selling of ObamaCare was accomplished not only with lies. It also relied on the clever use of rhetoric: the language of persuasion. But even now, after the lies have been exposed, the rhetoric just keeps coming.

...

What I'm in the market for is a little truth in advertising. But all I hear is dishonest rhetoric, such as the claim that with ObamaCare some 30 million Americans now have health insurance. That's a reference to the ObamaCare expansion of Medicaid. But Medicaid isn't insurance; it's welfare. Equating a "free" government program with private products willingly bought by consumers with their own money might qualify as some lamer kind of rhetoric.
Progressives have a knack for drawing distinctions were none exist and for lumping together things that should be kept apart and distinct. It's called rhetoric, and we need to be able to recognize it if we don't want to be sold a bill of goods again.

And then we have this here 

 Every morning the media paws through a dictionary looking for the most innocuous ways to describe Obama’s big health care lie.
...

Obama wasn’t the first politician to lie. He won’t be the last. But most politicians who lie don’t have an army of reporters swarming around them to explain that they didn’t lie, but just inflated their misspeaking. One man did not get up in front of the microphones and cameras and lie over and over again. The entire liberal establishment lied. And it’s still lying.

The media’s lies and excuses, even more than the original Obama lie, reveal why liberals can never be trusted.

If Obama had only lied about being on crack or with an intern, that might be an impeachable act, but an understandable human failing. But he wasn’t lying to cover up something shameful that he did. He lied because he didn’t think Americans deserved to keep their health plans… or the truth.
Obama lied because he is a liberal.

That Obama would lie was an inevitable as the sun rising in the morning and the taxman coming in the spring. The lie was baked into the nature of the progressive movement that he identified with and its social experiments with human lives for the greater good that he participated in.

Lying isn’t incidental to a liberal. Liberal is another word for liar. Someone who believes, as Obama and his media cronies do, that Americans are too stupid and ignorant to be trusted to choose their own health care, isn’t about to trust them with the truth.

Liberals don’t believe that the people they lie to are their equals. If they did, not only wouldn’t they lie to them, but they wouldn’t subscribe to a skewed leftist take on liberalism that compels them to take away choices from people for their own good.

You don’t take away someone’s right to choose unless you think that they are inferior to you.
...

If you think that the average person is a moron, then the only answer is to set up to a totalitarian system to nudge the marching morons into the death panels for their own greater good while lying to them that the death panelists are really the judges for the next hot talent competition.

If ordinary people don’t deserve the basic decency of being allowed to make decisions about their own health care, then they also don’t deserve the basic decency of not being lied to their faces about those decisions being taken away from them.

If Obama had trusted and respected Americans, he wouldn’t have lied to them about ObamaCare. But if he had really trusted and respected them, he wouldn’t have inflicted ObamaCare on them.
Obama’s crime isn’t the lie. The lie is the cover-up of the crime. The crime is that Obama packaged a tax, a welfare program and a government takeover of health care together and called it reform.
The media has shown that Obama’s lie was no isolated incident by lying about the lie for the same reason that he told the lie. The health plan lie wasn’t the lie of one politician protecting his reputation; it was the big lie of a liberal establishment protecting its agenda.

The liberal media manipulates its readers, listeners and viewers the same way that liberal governments manipulate their citizens. Unlike Clinton’s lie, Obama’s lie was not one man’s mistake, but a movement’s arrogance. And not only hasn’t Obama stopped lying about his lie, but the media and the rest of his movement haven’t stopped lying about his lie.

Obama’s big health care lie shows why liberals can’t be trusted. Any movement that believes its members are superior to ordinary people cannot be trusted to represent them or to tell them the truth.

Andrew McCarthy explains the scheme behind the Obamacare fraud.

I could go on and on but, let's conclude with some fun:

"Selling hope's like selling soap, son, I'll tell you why
You can't make either one without a little bit of lye"

Well, last one by Ed Driscoll.

 The president and the officials around him are the product of the same progressive version of higher education that simultaneously excises politics from the study of government and public policy while politicizing education. This higher education denigrates experience; exalts rational administration; reveres abstract moral reasoning; confidently counts on the mainstream press to play for the progressive political team; accords to words fabulous abilities to remake reality; and believes itself to speak for the people while haughtily despising their way of life.

For a certain type of Postmodernist, perhaps a Rococo Marxist,  eventually this chronic lying  becomes involuntary, just like breathing.