Surprise: David Frum Writes in the NYT About The Tea Party: It Turns Out They're 100% Wrong and 200% Ignorant

Read it if you want. It's more of the same.

I just want to call out this Obama-propaganda lie:

If Republicans reject Obama-style fiscal stimulus, what do they advocate instead? A monetarist might recommend more money creation, even at the risk of inflation: “quantitative easing,” as it’s called. Yet leading voices in the Republican Party have convinced themselves that the country is on the verge of hyperinflation — a Weimar moment, says Glenn Beck. But if fiscal stimulus leads to socialism, and quantitative easing leads to Nazism, what on earth are we supposed to do? Cut the budget? But we won’t do that either! On Sean Hannity’s radio show, the Republican House leader John Boehner announced just before the election that one of his first priorities would be the repeal of the Obama Medicare cuts.

No one who claims this is anything but a liberal apologist for Obama. It's a lie, it was a lie the first time it was claimed, it has been exposed as a lie too many times since then to plausibly be anything except a deliberate lie on behalf of Obama, and to undermine conservatives.

Obama "cut" Medicare -- if we credit his future cuts as ever likely to actually happen. Which, based upon previous supposed cuts to Medicare which would take place in the future, we shouldn't -- see the "Doc Fix." Planned future cuts to Medicare's reimbursement of doctors (now past planned cuts to Medicare) have been "delayed" for ten years running now, and will likely be delayed forever.

But more importantly, Frum is suggesting that Obama made actual cuts to the budget which the Republicans would undo. That's simply not true-- Obama may have "cut" $500 billion from Medicare, but only to impound that money for purposes of funding his exciting new government social welfare program, ObamaCare.

This is not a "cut" in the budget. It's simply a redistribution of wealth.

Frum deliberately lies to readers, suggesting that Obama has made an important, prudent, budget-hawk type cut, when in fact all he did was take money which was to pay for seniors' health care and dedicate it to paying for non-seniors' health care. One could argue, if one believed in it, that that is a defensible re-ordering of priorities -- but what one may not argue under any circumstances, except the desire to willfully lie, is that this constitutes an actual "cut."

And yet Frum is crediting him for just that, and claiming that a Republican repeal of this measure would harm the budget. It would not. It would have zero effect on the overall budget -- it would simply be moving $500 billion from being spent in one category to being spent in another category.

David Frum can have all the emotional hissy-fits he likes, but I personally draw the line at outright lies.

posted by Ace at 10:32 AM

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