PRESIDENT MENDACIOUS

On MSNBC’s "Morning Joe" program last Thursday (6/30), host Joe Scarborough asked Time magazine editor Mark Halperin what he thought of President Barack Obama’s news conference the day before.

"I thought he was a dick yesterday," Mr. Halperin responded.

The broadcast wasn’t on delay, so censors couldn’t bleep the vulgarity.  Mr. Halperin apologized profusely, but MSNBC suspended him indefinitely.

Lost in the furor over Mr. Halperin’s choice of words was the substance of his argument.  Mr. Obama’s harsh attacks on Republicans will make it harder to reach a compromise on raising the ceiling on the national debt, Mr. Halperin said.

"If everybody else is willing to take on sacred cows and do tough things in order to achieve the goal of real deficit reduction, then I think it would be hard for the Republicans to stand there and say that the tax break for corporate jets is sufficiently important that we’re not willing to come to the table and get a deal done," the president said.

Later, Mr. Obama said Republicans were "willing to compromise their kids’ safety so that some corporate jet owner continues to get a tax break."

This was more than harshly partisan.  It was mendacious.  That’s a fancy word for lying, for being maliciously dishonest on purpose.

Enacted to help aircraft manufacturers recover from the 9/11 attacks, the corporate jet tax break provision is still law because President Obama included it in his stimulus plan.  Both houses of the Congress which approved it in 2009 were controlled by Democrats.

Eliminating it would save so little money "the White House could not even provide an estimate of the revenue that would be raised," noted the Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler.  Reuters business columnist James Pethokoukis said it would save $3 billion over ten years, 0.03 percent of the $9.5 trillion in new debt the president’s budget proposes to add during that period.

This was not Mr. Obama’s only mendacious whopper. 

New regulations imposed during the first two years of Mr. Obama’s presidency have imposed nearly $40 billion in additional costs.  The new rules "throw sand into the gears of progress," a business executive told White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley in an angry meeting June 16.

But at the news conference, the president posed as a cutter of red tape.  "What I have done — and this is unprecedented, by the way, no administration has done this before — I’ve said to each agency, don’t just look at current regulations or just don’t look at future regulations, regulations that we’re proposing, let’s go back and look at regulations that are already on the books, and if they don’t make sense, let’s get rid of them," he said.

Every president since Jimmy Carter has ordered such a review, noted Associated Press fact checker Calvin Woodward.

"Every single observer" who is not a politician says the deficit can’t be reduced substantially without raising taxes, Mr. Obama said.

"Of course" deficits can be controlled by spending cuts alone, acknowledged Ben Bernanke, who the president appointed to head the Federal Reserve, at a House Budget Committee hearing June 9.

Mr. Obama berated Congress for not showing "leadership" in the debt crisis.  But after Republicans asked him yet again to join negotiations, he jetted off to a fund-raiser in Philadelphia instead.

The best way to get to see the president is to set a tee time, said Sen. John Thune, R-SD.

So it is hard to quarrel with Mr. Halperin’s assessment of the president’s performance.  But he wasn’t the only dick at the news conference.

"Sadly, the room was full of journalists who do not consider themselves novices but who nevertheless let Obama get away with this demagogic dishonesty," said Jonah Goldberg of National Review.

Mr. Obama thinks he can say anything and get away with it, because most in the news media have his back.

The (often imaginary) gaffes of Republicans such as Michelle Bachmann are reported on the evening news, but Mr. Obama’s (more frequent) misstatements are not.

"We strive for a high level of discourse and comments like these have no place on our air," said the suits at NBC when they suspended Mr. Halperin.

MSNBC hosts and guests were never punished when they called former President George W. Bush a fascist, a murderer and a war criminal.  MSNBC strives for "a high level of discourse" only when the president is a Democrat.

The mendacity of MSNBC matches that of Mr. Obama’s.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.