President Obama's State Of The Union Address Whoppers
30 January 2010By Dave Lindorff
President Obama gives a good speech. He's smooth,
unruffled by audience response, good at a timely
ad-lib remark, and knows how to win over a tough
crowd--all skills that were in evidence at last
night's State of the Union address. But he's also good
at telling whoppers.
Here are a few.
Talking about health care, and the stalled bills in
House and Senate which have become so encrusted with
pro-industry amendments that the whole process should
be referred to as the Health Industry Enrichment Act,
Obama said at one point, addressing the doubts many in
Congress and among the broader public have about those
bills, "If anyone from either party has a better
approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the
deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for
seniors and stop insurance company abuses, let me
know. Let me know. Let me know. I'm eager to see it."
Hm-m-m. Actually, he has not been eager to see other
ideas at all. John Conyers has had another idea:
extending Medicare to cover everyone. He had it in the
form of a bill, HR 676, but at the urging of the White
House, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi kept that bill from
even getting a hearing. Earlier, almost a year ago,
Obama held a conference at the White House to hear
ideas about health care reform, but he excluded from
that conference any advocates of what is called
"single-payer"--shorthand for a Canadian-style health
system in which the government insures everyone, and
sets the reimbursement amounts for doctors and
hospitals, medical services of all kinds, and drugs.
And yet, expanding Medicare to cover everyone, as I've
written several times on this site, would probably end
up costing less than the federal government and state
and local governments (and of course ultimately
taxpayers) already are spending on Medicaid,
Veteran's health care, hospital charity care, and
other public medical programs, and in any event would,
even if raising taxes slightly, simultaneously
eliminate the health care costs for insurance
currently paid by employers, employees and the
self-employed, while also giving the government
enormous power to negotiate lower costs for drugs,
doctors and hospitals. Because the program would be
larger and more powerful with respect to the private
health care delivery system, it would also be able to
reduce the cost of providing health care to the
elderly who are already on Medicare.
That is to say, there is, already operating for 45
million elderly citizens, a health care program that,
if expanded to all, would, as the president asked,
"bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover
the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors and
stop insurance company abuses."
But the truth is, he doesn't want to talk about it and
doesn't want to even hear about it
The second big whopper was Iraq. There the president,
to loud applause, said he would have all combat troops
out of Iraq by August of this year. At another point,
though, he went further, saying that "all our troops"
would be "coming home." The truth, though, is that
they won't be. In fact, though, as many as 50,000 US
troops will remain in Iraq after this August. Whether
they will be "in combat" or not is really not up to
them. If they are attacked, of course they will be in
combat. They may well be sent into battle too, though
who knows if we'll hear about it. There are unlikely
to be too many members of the press with them, as the
focus shifts to Afghanistan. But 50,000 is a lot of
troops--much more than the US has in South Korea, for
instance. It's hardly an end to the war in Iraq.
Third, the president slipped by the new big war,
Afghanistan, in an astonishingly abrupt single
paragraph. Think about it. He has ordered an
escalation of that conflict, where the US already has
committed 70,000 troops, with another 30,000 on the
way, not counting perhaps 50-60,000 more private
mercenaries, and has called for a new aggressive
strategy of capturing and holding territory--a
strategy that is bound to increase both US and
innocent Afghani casualties--and he only said a couple
of sentences about it.
And those sentences were full of lies. Obama said the
US is "training Afghan security forces so they can
begin to take the lead in July of 2011, and our troops
can begin to come home," but he knows his own advisors
are telling him that those Afghan military forces are
incapable of being expanded to do that job. The whole
country is basically illiterate and not capable of
being trained to handle much of the equipment, the
military and police are hopelessly corrupt, and the
tribal system makes a unified national army a
pipe-dream. He said the US will "reward good
governance," but in fact has allied itself with a
corrupt narco-regime led by Hamid Karzai, whose own
brother is a leading drug kingpin.
There were more lies and misleading statements through
the speech, for example his lie that his
administration has "prohibited torture," but these
three alone make it amply clear that the president was
not doing his constitutional duty of giving Congress
an accurate report on the "state of the union."
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