Hypocrisy, lies or something else

By Jim Terry

Seems like every time the president speaks the veracity of his pronouncements are called into question.

A recent example of the president's actions straying from his statements played out when 40,000 members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union withdrew membership from the AFL-CIO. The reason cited in a letter from the ILWU president to Donald Trumka, president of AFL-CIO , was the support given by Trumka's union for Obamacare.

Specifically, the letter said, "President Obama ran on a platform that he would not tax medical plans and at the 2009 AFL-CIO Convention, you stated that labor would not stand for a tax on our benefits."

Unfortunately, Obama pushed for a tax on so-called "Cadillac plans," which describes health plans provided by unions, and the AFL-CIO supported Obama's effort to tax those plans. That's hypocrisy.

During the final debate with Mitt Romney in last year's presidential campaign Obama said, "The sequester is not something that I've proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed."

Of course, after the election, when Obama was safely planted in the Oval Office for another term, the White House admitted that, yes, the sequester was the president's idea. That's lying.

An even more blatant example of Obama's veracity problem, and one that impacts today's events was the president's statement on September 4, 2013 concerning Syria's use of weapons of mass destruction on its own population, "First of all, I didn't set a red line. The world set a red line."

One of Obama's public relations firms, ABC News, tried to get him off the hook in a story which ran on August 26, 2013 when it said, "President Obama's "red line" on Syria isn't quite as straightforward as it's been made out to be."

Here's what Obama said on August 20, 2012, "We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation."

Who was the 'we' and 'us' he used in his statement. I don't think he was speaking for the rest of the world, which he later said had set the red line.

That's deception.

Some paint all these language/action incongruities by Obama as hypocrisy; some as lies.

Collins Concise English Dictionary defines hypocrisy as, "the practice of professing standards, beliefs, etc, contrary to one's real character or actual behaviour."

A better, stronger description of Obama's continual actions contradicting his statements is twofaced deception.

Unfortunately, this deception is not exclusive to Obama. The entire Washington establishment, including congress and both political parties, regularly practice two-faced deception.

Congress has continued to promise to include itself in Obamacare. However, in August, a behind closed doors deal was cut with the Obama administration to exempt congressmen and their staffs from the burdens they imposed on all other Americans.

And Republicans, who have been calling for repeal of Obamacare for nearly three years, and who have an opportunity to stop funding for what one of its sponsors, Sen. Max Baucus, described as, "A train wreck," are not willing to do everything they possibly can do, including shutting down the federal government briefly, if that is required to stop Obamacare.

There may be, however, a different explanation-a sinister explanation- of the increased deception by the people we elect to represent us.

Perhaps they have all read George Orwell's novel, 1984. In this novel of a bleak future world where the Party controls everyone and everything, the Party's slogans are: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.

The logic for these slogans is doublethink which is employed by the Party and instilled in the population and which Orwell defines:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.

Yes, perhaps 1984 has become the political textbook for American politicians.

© Jim Terry