Obama's auto bailout bait and switch

Barack Obama has proved many times he is the most deceptive and even brazen liar to occupy the Oval Office since Richard Nixon and he did it again during a speech he gave in Detroit dishonestly claiming the auto bailout worked, was responsible for the auto industry's rebound and saved hundreds of thousands of job. Not one word was true.

Obama lies often and easily and he does it because he knows the news media wont hold him accountable either out of incompetence or sycophancy.

Just as a brief reminder of how brazenly Obama will lie, during a PBS interview with Jim Lerher after the healthcare bill passed without a public option Obama said the bill was 95% of everything he wanted. When Lerher pointed out there wasn't a public option Obama said "I never campaigned for a pubic option" meaning a public option wasnt one of the things he wanted.

The next day liberal blogs were posting YouTubes of Obama speeches going back to 2007 and 2008 and his own 2008 campaign literature where he campaigned for, and promised, a public health insurance plan. In April he also pledged to veto any financial reform bill that didnt contain strong regulations against derivitives, the financial instrument that caused the economic meltdown. Nothing in the financial reform bill he signed changed a banks ability to deal in derivitives.

Obama went to Detroit and full of fire and chest beating expounded on how well the auto bailout worked, a bailout he was criticized for by many at the time. He took an "I told you so" pleasure in pointing out how wrong his critics were and how right he was. And every word was an unvarnished lie.

Obama said that the choices he faced at the time were to let the auto industry go into "liquidation" -- that was the word he used -- "liquidation" and he used it a number of times -- or give them bailout money. And he talked about how many more hundreds of thousands of jobs would have been lost had the auto industry been forced into "liquidation".

The truth is, liquidation was never an option. It was never even discussed or contemplated. What GM wanted the bailout money for was to stave off bankruptcy, exactly what most people felt they needed to do to get turned around and eventually that is what they did.

When Obama used the word "liquidation" he knew he was pulling the kind of bait and switch shady used car salesmen are famous for, and he knew what he was doing. It was a calculated lie, choosing a word he was sure no one would notice and if they did he was sure he could wriggle out of it. Like he did with healthcare reform when halfway through the debate and after secretly ditching the public option in a White House meeting with healthcare lobbyists, he changed the goal from "healthcare reform" to "health insurance reform" and hoped no one noticed. Most in the news media never did. Howard Dean noticed. Congressmen Anthony Weiner and Alan Grayson noticed. And Matt Taibii at Rolling Stone noticed. That was about it.

Getting back to the auto bailout, there was never a discussion or even the possibility of GM, Ford or Chrysler ever going into "liquidation". Never. It never would have happened. Obama used a word he knew was a false characterization to justify a policy that actually failed and then tried to take credit for a success that he had nothing to do with.

The whole point of the bailout was to save GM and Chrysler from filing for bankruptcy. Not liquidation. Bankruptcy.

At the time of the auto bailout in March of 2009, I was extremely critical of Obama and the Democrats decision to bail them out because I knew giving them money to prevent a bankruptcy not only in the end wouldnt prevent it, I thought bankruptcy was exactly what GM needed and said so. And I was right. But the little detail Obama conveniently and purposely left out in his speech, was that the bailout to prevent GM from going into bankruptcy failed. Instead, he substituted the word "liquidation", a completely dishonest characterization of what the situation was at the time. Three months after the bailout failed GM filed for bankruptcy.

The only reason GM is now rebounding is precisely because they went into bankruptcy which I and others advocated in November of 2008. That forced GM into a reorganization plan. That plan is now showing dividends.

The bailout, which totalled $27 billion, whose purpose was to stave off a GM bankruptcy failed to do that. It was tax payer money down the drain. And GM could have gone into bankruptcy without one penny of taxpayer money.

Yes it looks like GM will repay the bailout eventually. But it was precisely the thing they wanted to prevent -- bankruptcy -- that has turned the company around. That and new management. It was the old management that ran the company into the ground losing $70 billion in the 3 years prior to the economic melt down, then tried to use to economic crisis as the excuse as to why they were in such trouble, came to Washington with their hands out, and once again, for purely political reasons, Obama saw to it they got the money ( winning Michigan was crucial to Obama's election and this was payback to the Governor who campaigned for him). It did not save any jobs. GM cut tens of thousands of jobs and closed plants under the bankruptcy reorganization.

Obama trying to claim that it was the bailout that turned GM around and made it profitable is as dishonest as saying he never campaigned for the public option. And as dishonest as a used car salesman who swears that the lemon he is trying to sell was owned by a little old lady who only used the car to go to church on Sundays.