Festering Sequester Fiction

After months of fear-mongering, scapegoating and brow-beating, President Obama finally has been convicted of deceit by his own words on the automatic budget cuts mandated by the sequestration.

In announcing his failure to strike a deal with Congress, the president told the White House press corps the following: "We will get through this.  This is not going to be an apocalypse."  Those words directly contradict what Obama has been saying in a series of orchestrated press appearances using first responders, military families and others as props.

On all those occasions, the president and his administration lackeys painted a doomsday scenario.  Children would go hungry.  Airline safety would be imperiled.  The economy would collapse.  Schools would furlough teachers.  The military would be gutted.  And on and on.

But Obama's biggest whopper was alleging the sequester was a Republican idea.  He repeatedly claimed the sequester was "not something I proposed."  As it turns out, that too was a falsehood.

His house of lies crumbled when a few news outlets, most notably The Washington Post, decided to lift the protective veil the media had used to shield the thin-skinned Obama from criticism.  As the facts dribbled out, Obama blamed the messengers instead of accepting responsibility for his dishonesty.

Here is the truth about sequestration, undoubtedly the worst example of a gobbledygook word ever coined by politicians:  

• The sequestration suggestion came directly from the White House.  It was the president's negotiating team that first raised the idea.  It was then championed by Obama. Yet he denied that fact until The Washington Post's Bob Woodward exposed the lie.  Obama is also the person who suggested half the cuts be cleaved from the defense budget, but he continues to moan about massive furloughs and cutbacks in the defense industry as if he is blameless.
• The $85 billion in budget cuts are a tiny percentage of the nation's overall annual spending. It represents a mere two percent of the $3.54 trillion 2012 federal budget. How can such a minuscule percentage of government spending have such massive repercussions?  Answer: it doesn't.    
• Republicans in the Senate offered a proposal that would give the president and his administration time to reallocate the mandated cuts to protect critical services.  Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and his fellow Democrats defeated the measure.  Obviously, the president's goal is to extract maximum pain from the sequester for political gain. He has no interest in mitigating the impact of reductions.         

Finding $85 billion to slice from the bloated federal budget should be a no-brainer.  In just the past two years, the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) has identified more than 1,362 duplicate federal programs that waste $364.5 billion annually. Why not start there to trim the budget?

Obama would rather engage in cheap theatrics, playing to his legion of uniformed disciples.  His partisanship and political pugilism suit his ends.  However, most Americans outside the Washington Beltway are growing weary of his lack of leadership and his cavalier attitude towards the truth.