Wrap-Up Of Obama's Press Conference

Barack Obama's speech tonight was short, but the questions dragged on for quite a while. His remarks can be seen here. Not surprisingly, it's already been revealed as being disingenuous at best. Take a look...

"The deficit is cut in half" over five years in my budget, Obama says. Yes — when you begin with a $1.8 trillion deficit, that's not too difficult. In fact, "half" is still about twice as large as any of the Bush-era deficits that Republicans created when they controlled everything.

Obama says cap and trade is best way he knows to move to alternative sources.
The truth is that cap and trade has failed in Europe and that instead of reducing greenhouse gases that carbon dioxide emissions are actually increasing.

Obama just compared his historic spending to the Bush debt he inherited. That is a gross distortion of the truth.

Obama feigns outrage at AIG Scandal. Obama says it took a couple of days to address the AIG scandal because he likes to think before he speaks...
Two days to think about the AIG Scandal?
It took most Americans about 5 minutes to get outraged.

The most radical pro-abortion president ever just said he struggled over funding embryonic stem cell research. It certainly didn't seem to bother him when he was supporting infanticide back in Illinois.

Obama said, in his introductory statement:

At the end of the day, the best way to bring our deficit down in the long run is not with a budget that continues the very same policies that have led us to a narrow prosperity and massive debt. It's with a budget that leads to broad economic growth by moving from an era of borrow and spend to one where we save and invest.

This is entirely disingenuous. Obama's budget plan multiplies the federal deficit far beyond what it has ever been, in any prior administration. So how is he "moving from an era of borrow and spend"? It's a lie, pure and simple, as this chart shows (note that it begins before the Bush administration and reflects Obama's budget projections that go beyond his maximum possible term):

Obama also said this:

Now, understand that AIG is not a bank. It's an insurance company. If it were a bank and it had effectively collapsed, then the FDIC could step in, as it does with a whole host of banks, as it did with IndyMac, and in a structured way renegotiate contracts, get rid of bad assets, strengthen capital requirements, resell it on the private marketplace.

So we've got a regular mechanism whereby we deal with FDIC- insured banks. We don't have that same capacity with an institution like AIG. And that's part of the reason why it has proved so problematic.

Powerline's response:

But there is, in fact, a widely used mechanism to deal with non-bank financial institutions like insurance companies that may become insolvent. It's called bankruptcy. In bankruptcy, contracts are renegotiated, bad assets are gotten rid of and good assets are sold into the private sector. That system exists, and would have worked perfectly well for AIG if it were not for the federal government's desire to funnel payments to AIG's counterparties--most notably, European banks--without taking responsibility for doing so. Under Obama's proposal, every time an insurance company becomes insolvent it will be another opportunity to expand federal power.

Obama also suggests that charities who say excessive taxation on charitable giving will hurt their operations are...wrong.

Michelle Malkin has a thorough run-down and commentary on the whole thing here. Her headline says it all: "POTUS and TOTUS meet the press: Defensive about AIG, blame-card on debt, blows off charities".

Not much of a barn-burner, really. He's just rehashing many of the things his woefully inept administration has been doing over the past couple weeks to try to garner public support. This event was kind of odd, unless you realize that Obama's only good at two things: reading speeches off Teleprompter, and campaigning. He was able to both of those tonight. Otherwise, it was a non-event.

There's my two cents.


Sources:
http://michellemalkin.com/2009/03/24/potus-and-totus-meet-the-press/
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/03/023156.php
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/03/thief-in-chief-pushes-massive-budget-at.html
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2YxOTU0OWM5MzYwMTgyN2YyYWUwZjJiYTg0ZGIxODQ=