Was Barack Obama Lying Then or Now?

Posted by Erick Erickson (Diary)
Thursday, July 19th at 4:47AM EDT

RedState.com:

We all learned yesterday that if you accurately quote Barack Obama’s speeches or fictionalized accounts of his life that he penned, you are automatically taking him out of context. And, as Kevin Eder noted on twitter, you’re racist.

Conservatives, such as myself, who dared quote Barack Obama’s Friday entry into grade school Marxism in Virginia are being attacked for taking him out of context. The quote supposedly being taken out of context is Mr. Obama saying, “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

We supposedly took it out of context because the preceding sentence in the speech was, “Somebody invested in roads and bridges.” The morons at Media Matters and elsewhere would have us believe that Mr. Obama’s comments about building business had to do with government building infrastructure. Not only is that a nonsensical lie, to believe that one actually would have to take Barack Obama out of context.

In context, Mr. Obama started off saying, “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive,” among other things. He was preaching grade school Marxism that those who have become the most successful got there because of the hard work of others, not their own hard work, and therefore they must have their private property confiscated by the government through taxes to be redistributed to others in the name of fairness. Go all the way to December 6, 2011, in Osawatomie, Kansas and the President has been sounding a consistent tone.

The focus on what Barack Obama said has missed out on perhaps the most important sentence of his entire speech. You just read it. Let me highlight it for you.

Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive,

On October 30, 2008, Barack Obama stood before a crowd of 35,000 at Missouri University. He said, “We are five days from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Was Barack Obama lying in 2008 or was he lying Friday in Virginia. Why lying? Because it is hard to reconcile in 2008 his belief that he would “fundamentally transform the United States” with his 2012 statement that “Somebody helped create the unbelievable American system that we have.”

If he really thought the system was truly unbelievable, he couldn’t want to “fundamentally transform it.” The two only reconcile if you think Barack Obama believes he has fundamentally transformed American into an unbelievable system. And if he thought that, given his ego, you would think he would take credit for it instead of saying “somebody.” The two statements are not reconcilable.

But humoring the President, let’s pretend he does think he has “fundamentally transformed” America into an “unbelievable system.”

If that’s the case, we have a huge problem on our hands that the President of the United States thinks +8% unemployment, Canadians 20% richer than us, a growing number of people on food stamps, disability, welfare, and out of work is somehow the product of an “unbelievable system.”

I mean, I know it is unbelievable, but unbelievable not in a good way. That doesn’t seem to be what he was suggesting.