Obama’s Biggest Lies | FrontPage Magazine
By Arnold Ahlert On March 26, 2012
Americans have endured many politicians with a capacity for “embellishing” the truth. Yet as the last three years have revealed, with a special emphasis on the current election campaign, president Barack Obama is in a class by himself. He has lied so often and with such ease, it is impossible to catalogue them all. But some of the more egregious and dangerous lies deserve exposure, because the same man who was virtually a black box when he was elected in 2008 — with ample help from a collaborative, compromised media – is once again trying to pull the proverbial wool over the electorate’s eyes.
Let’s begin with energy, where the president’s most recent departure from the facts with respect to gas and oil stand out. This is largely due to an ironic twist of fate: the man who promised energy prices would “skyrocket” if he were elected is furiously backpedalling away from that promise, because those skyrocketing prices imperil his re-election hopes.
Thus, the president makes the assertion that oil production is higher than it has been in the last eight years. The statement is technically true, but leaves out the damning details that could be summed up by the reality oil production is up in spite of the president’s efforts, not because of them. First, the president is taking credit for drilling permits issued by previous administrations. Furthermore, as this government resource chart reveals, the number of oil and gas leases issued on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land declined dramatically from 2,416 in 2008 to 1,308 in 2010. The acreage available for those leases has also declined, from 2.6 million acres to 1.3 million acres, over the same period. In 2011, oil and gas production on federal land declined by another 11 and 6 percent, respectively, as well. The non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) report released last Wednesday reveals that 96 percent of the increase in oil production occurred on land not owned or controlled by the federal government.
What about offshore drilling? Again, the president is taking credit for an increase his administration had nothing to do with, and cooking up more lies in the process. Thus, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s recent claim regarding an increase in oil production from 450 million barrels in to more than 589 million barrels in 2010, conveniently omits that those production numbers are the result of leases issued from 1996-2000 under the Deepwater Royalty Relief Act, or that the Obama administration’s moratorium on oil production in the Gulf of Mexico has caused a 300,000 barrel per day decline in production for 2011, and a projected decline of more than 150 million barrels of oil in 2012, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
Perhaps the president’s biggest energy whopper is his newfound “support” for the Keystone XL pipeline. Last fall, the president once again punted on authorizing its construction, claiming that he was forced by Republicans to make a hasty decision about the project, as part of a compromise regarding the extension of the payroll tax reduction deal. Such “haste” is completely undermined by the reality that the project had already undergone a three-year study, and had been OK’d by EPA. The move was a transparent sop to his radical environmentalist constituency. But the reality of rising gas prices affects a far larger portion of the electorate necessary to his re-election.
What to do? At a campaign stop in Cushing, OK last week, the president took credit for approving the southern half of the Keystone project–which was already scheduled for construction beginning in June and doesn’t need presidential or State Department approval, since it doesn’t cross an international boundary.
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