Pun Salad

Thought I should start classifying the ways in which our president's dazzling rhetoric is used to bamboozle. The example today is: The Outright Lie.

OK, maybe I should say probable outright lies. Here's an example from the Inaugural Address:

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.

But all "programs" benefit someone ("at a decent wage"), don't they? I predict that programs ended by the Obama administration under this criterion will be zero.

At Cato, Daniel Griswold notes that if there ever was a program ripe for ending, it's …

President Obama has wrapped himself in the mantle of change, yet as a candidate he endorsed the 2008 farm bill. The existing U.S. policy of production subsidies and import tariffs, a policy that has remained essentially unchanged for 75 years, arguably "works" for a small number of relatively well-off sugar, dairy, corn, rice, and cotton farmers. But for the vast majority of Americans, the farm bill delivers higher and more volatile prices at the store, billions of dollars a year in additional government spending, higher cost for U.S. businesses, a degraded environment, and a harder slog out of poverty for millions of farmers in less developed countries. [You can go here to find Cato research on how farm programs have failed to work in our national interest.]

If Senator and candidate Obama could not see the need to end our failed farm policies, it is hard to imagine many if any other programs that will come to an end under his administration.

Indeed. Another bit of evidence comes from Donald Lambro, writing about the "stimulus" funds. The article is full of outrageousness, but for our purposes, here's a key point:

Another $54 billion will go to 19 programs that the Office of Management and Budget has rated as "ineffective" or "results not demonstrated."