Blogs For Victory

And fuzzy math:

Q Robert, you talk about honest and transparent budgeting and I wanted to come back to Chuck’s question about the $2 trillion figure that the President used last night of savings over the next 10 years. We were told last night that that basically referred to two things. One is the expiration of the tax cuts on the wealthy that would happen next year. And two is a reduction of what we are currently spending in Iraq —

MR. GIBBS: I think that’s a — I think that’s certainly a decent part of it. I don’t know, not having seen — or at least not having in front of me the formal documents to know whether that’s 100 percent.

Q Okay. But let me ask — is it transparent to say that tax increases are part of savings? And is it transparent to say that we’re going to be saving that much from Iraq when nobody expects that 10 years out we would be spending what we’re spending today in Iraq? Even the previous administration agreed to get out of Iraq by 2012. And that’s the baseline you’re culling savings from.

MR. GIBBS: It isn’t — I mean, if we’re not spending the money, and the money doesn’t go out the door, and the money doesn’t increase the deficit, and the deficit decreases by some amount, ultimately getting you to the President’s goal of having a $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion deficit in his first four years in office —

Q But nobody expects to spend 10 years from now what we’re spending today in Iraq. And if we use that as our baseline, saying, oh, we’re saving because we’re not spending what we did 10 years ago, I mean, isn’t that sort of setting up a funny money comparison?

The answer to that is “yes”. So, naturally, Gibbs answered “no”, because when discussing Obamunism, honesty is most certainly not the best policy if your hope is to get re-elected in 2012.

This is part and parcel with the Obama assertion that his policies will create or save some millions of jobs…its the or save part which is important, because it allows Obama to cook the books any way he wants and claim to have carried out his program with 100% success, even if unemployment is at 14% in 2012. Its all part of a rhetorical shell game which is designed to gull the fools in the Democrat base and allow as few handles as possible for the GOP to hammer Obama upon – Obama hopes to have never answered a single difficult question in a straightforward manner by the end of this term – and, so far, his plan is working as the MSM – in spite of this rather trenchant line of questioning – is not showing itself up to challenging Obama directly.

The hardest task the GOP will have over the next few years is to speak the truth without sounding like we’re being mean or just knee-jerk in opposition. Obama and his handlers are masters at framing the debate into a “heads I win, tails you lose” set of propositions. This is why as we oppose Obama, we must do so with care and find the two or three issues which we can present most favorably to the American people, demonstrating that Obama is a fool and that his policies will fail…and once they do fail, we’ll then reap the electoral benefit. We can’t really stop Obamunism – Obama has the votes in Congress to pretty much do what he wants – but we can delay it, and set the stage for a swift repeal of it, once we are returned to power.