By Susan Duclos
Before Obama's administration officially issued the memorandum cutting federal government spending by $85 billion, (memo embedded here) fact checkers and even members of the mainstream media had been exposing lie after lie after lie from Obama and his administration officials, as Obama traveled around the country to speak out against the sequester that his own office proposed, pitched to Congress, then Obama signed into law.
March 1, 2013 came, the day the spending cuts that were part of the sequester law were due to go into effect and Barack Obama once again took to the airwaves... surprise surprise, fact checkers found that Obama told another lie, while repeating lies the fact checkers had already given him four pinocchios on previously.
The New Obama Lie
Starting tomorrow everybody here, all the folks who are cleaning
the floors at the Capitol. Now that Congress has left, somebody’s going
to be vacuuming and cleaning those floors and throwing out the garbage.
They’re going to have less pay. The janitors, the security guards, they
just got a pay cut, and they’ve got to figure out how to manage that.
That’s real.”
— President Obama, news conference, March 1, 2013
Washington Post's The Fact Checker gives Obama another four Pinocchios for that whopper.
Obama’s remarks continue the administration’s pattern of overstating the potential impact of the sequester, which we have explored this week. But this error is particularly bad--and nerve-wracking to the janitors and security guards who were misled by the president’s comments.
We originally thought this was maybe a Two Pinocchio rating, but in light of the AOC memo and the confirmation that security guards will not face a pay cut, nothing in Obama’s statement came close to being correct.
Since Barack Obama is still telling Americans the sequester was the Republicans idea and fault, despite being exposed as a liar by fact checkers over a year ago on that very statement, I would not be surprised in the least if this latest lie gets blamed on his teleprompter... I mean, it made him say it right?
The president's mention prompted Carlos Elias, the superintendent of the U.S. Capitol building and the Capitol Visitors Center, to email his employees within hours of Mr. Obama's comment.
"The pay and benefits of EACH of our employees WILL NOT be impacted," Elias wrote.
Here is a serious question: When Obama has been caught red-handed, time and again, and exposed so publicly, lying to Americans, how on earth are our allies across the globe supposed to believe a single word or promise he makes to them?