Editor's Note: This article first appeared in the November issue of Townhall Magazine.
Documentary producer and author Jack Cashill talks about his new book, "You Lie! The Evasions, Omissions, Fabrications, Frauds, and Outright Falsehoods of Barack Obama."
Townhall: The 2013 PolitiFact Lie of the Year was: ‘If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.’ Do you think this was the president’s biggest lie?
Cashill: I would call that his signature lie, other presidents had signature achievements, Obama had a signature lie. I have 75 subchapters each beginning with a specific lie, and then I named my top 25 at the end. The ‘If you want your health care plan you can keep it,’ was, in a sense, the most consequential of the lies in that it got him re-elected and it got Obamacare passed. But it wasn’t the boldest or the nastiest.
The boldest lie is probably one he told to Bill O’Reilly on the interview just before the Super Bowl in February 2014. The subject of Benghazi came up and here is the quote, he said: “We revealed to the American people exactly what we understood at the time.”
That is so untrue in so many ways. And it so cynical because people died and there was not effort to even clarify why they died or under what circum- stances they died or what Obama did on the evening they died. We still don’t know that.
Townhall: You say in the chapter ‘The Statesman’ that Obama said “This administration has done more for the security of Israel than any previous administration.” Can you flesh out how that’s been a lie?
Cashill: In the course of that chapter I quote any number of people saying just the opposite, starting with Benjamin Netanyahu. The United States has had a special relationship with Is- rael since its founding, it wouldn’t have existed without the active support of the United States.
But in Obama’s case, he had from day one been hectoring Israeli political figures to yield to the forces around them, including the Palestinians, Hezbollah, Hamas, etc. And not only that, but they are constantly making these sly references comparing, as Kerry did, Israel to South Africa. The use of the word ‘apartheid’ in comparing the two of them, or in suggesting that Israel would be abandoning them if they x, y, or z. This is an unprecedented departure from American relations with Israel, let alone the best or the strongest of anything.
Townhall: Are there any areas that you believe Obama has been faithful to his word?
Cashill: I started out to chronicle the lies that Barack Obama told, and I ended up, essentially, writing a history of the presidency. In virtually every single area, as I go through the book: as a statesman, as an economist, as a tax collector, as a regulator of weaponry, as a commander in chief, as a health care guru, it is littered with lies. One thing is bridged with one lie after another.
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A classic case is Guantanamo. This was something that was entirely within his purview and it was a very important promise to the leftward leaning of his base. For the first two years of his presidency he had both houses of Congress under his sway, he had the media fully behind him, there was no reason for him not to close it.
He says things indifferent to whether they’re true or not. I define lie as either, you know, consciously lying, or you’re just fully indifferent to the outcome or the truth. And in his case many of them he’s just fully indifferent. He liked the way it sounded: ‘I’m going to close Guantanamo.’ But he just never got around to doing it.
Townhall: Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution states that a president may be removed from office on conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors. Do you think his lies justify impeach- ment?
Cashill: Yeah, I would say you could probably say they justify impeachment, but would I recommend impeachment? No. I mean, it’s not gonna happen, it would not succeed, and it would cause more problems than it’s worth. We still have two more years, we’re just gonna have to deal with it. If he were impeached, Joe Biden would take over, and that wouldn’t be much of an improvement.
Townhall: Is there anything I haven’t asked that you’d like to add?
Cashill: He would not have been elected without two critical lies, and there are people in the mainstream who don’t want to talk about them, even in mainstream conservative media.
One is, his claim, and he said this to America’s Assembled School Children in September 2009, he said: “I know what it’s like because my father left home when I was 2 years old.”
He never spent a single night under the same roof as his father when he was a baby. He started both of his convention speeches with that story about the improbable love between his parents and their abiding faith in the possibilities of the nation. It was totally fraudulent; they never spent a night together. There was no relationship; she spent the first year of Obama’s life in Seattle, Washington with the baby.
They built the Obama mystique around this multicultural ideal that they were this happy loving family, and that finally Obama senior decided he had to go to Harvard and it broke up. Both of them hated America, both of the parents. The whole thing was a fraud, but it was an extraordinarily successful fraud and one that they sold over and over and over again.
The other lie is this, when he was speaking on the campaign trail in the summer of 2008 to a group of Virginia schoolteachers, he said: “I wrote two books, and I actually wrote them myself.”
He said that to differentiate himself from Republicans who used ghostwriters. Obama was lying about that; he had ghostwriters on both of his books. On the first one it was Bill Ayers. The second book it was likely his speechwriter John Favreau.
It was on the basis of “Dreams from My Father” that the genius myth was built. The myth that he was the greatest writer to ever occupy the White House and that he was the smartest president we’ve ever had. He had ascended all the way through, from Punahou High to Harvard Law on the basis of the fact that he sounded just like a white liberal but looked like an African American. That was the essential lie that he told to get himself elected and the media, even to this day, refuse to question it. •
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