President Barack Obama has made a career out of lying, Newt Gingrich claims in a new e-book released on Wednesday.
And his about-face on whether his healthcare provisions are a penalty or a tax is reminiscent of "George Orwell’s '1984' or the best efforts of Pravda at the height of the Soviet period," the former House speaker says.
“President Obama pledged not to raise taxes,” Gingrich writes. “Then he argued vehemently that the penalty in Obamacare was not a tax. Then his solicitor general defended the constitutionality of Obamacare as a tax.
“Then, as soon as the Supreme Court decided Obamacare was constitutional only under the taxing power and was explicitly unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause, which is what the penalty relied on, President Obama and his team began methodically and systematically denying Obamacare involved a tax.”
Gingrich claims in the e-book entitled “No Taxation with MISrepresentation,” that the president’s “pattern of dishonesty” has three distinct categories:
Personal dishonesty at a petty level almost as a habit
Cultural dishonesty in the pattern of much of modern popular culture
A deliberate systematic creation of a false history of key events and principles
“It is the deliberate systematic dishonesty by the entire Obama team which is a real threat to the very nature of representative self-government,” writes Gingrich, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination this year.
“It is the remarkably brazen explicit falsehoods about the Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare being a tax which vividly illustrates the Obama system of systematic dishonesty.”
Gingrich argues that such dishonesty “undermines the very core of the American contract between the citizen and the elected official.”
“Our country was based on the theme, ‘no taxation without representation,’" he writes. “Yet representation inherently suggests some core standard of honesty between those who are to be represented and those who would represent them.
“Obama’s systematic and pervasive dishonesty undermines the very fabric of the American system,” says Gingrich. “If it is allowed to continue, it will teach a generation of younger Americans that routine, systematic, dishonesty can be a winning system that creates legitimacy by the very act of succeeding.”
Gingrich says that the Supreme Court decision on Obamacare — written by Chief Justice John Roberts — “specifically rejected the sophistry of those who would argue that a tax was not a tax.”
“As soon as President Obama won a Supreme Court victory based on arguing that Obamacare involved a tax, the entire Obama team reverted to claiming that it was not a tax.
“The president’s systematic dishonesty went so far as to switch the history of the tax vote in the Supreme Court (which involved Chief Justice Roberts and the four liberal members of the Court voting to sustain) into a Republican plot.”
Gingrich took particular issue with an interview that Obama gave to a Cincinnati TV station, in which the president said, “One of the things that you learn as president is that what you say matters, and your principles matter. And sometimes, you've got to fight for things that you believe in, and you can't just switch on a dime.”
Gingrich writes, “This one interview is a perfect example of the Saul Alinsky 'Rules for Radicals' approach, which Obama had taught as a ‘neighborhood organizer.’"
He says that Roberts’ decision to side with the court’s liberal justices was a challenge to the American people, saying the chief justice made it clear that it was not the court’s job to write policy — that is for politicians who can be booted out of office at election time if the public doesn’t like their decisions.
“Obamacare was already opposed by 60 percent of the American people according to most polls,” he says. “If Obamacare now had to carry the additional burden of being a massive tax increase, it would be almost impossible to sustain politically even if the court had sustained its constitutionality. The chief justice virtually set the stage for this rejection.
“With a presidential election looming only four months away, the threat to President Obama’s re-election and to the survival of House and Senate Democrats was vivid and real.”
Gingrich points out that both Obama and his campaign manager David Plouffe had used the word “audacity” in their book titles. “The White House answer was so audacious that it brought back memories of President Obama's book title — ‘The Audacity of Hope’ — and his campaign manager’s memoir, ‘The Audacity to Win.’
“Faced with a threat that could destroy their presidency, the Obama campaign reverted to the 'audacity to lie' on a grand scale. The Obama team position was very straightforward. If the truth would defeat them, then the truth had to disappear.”
He said the Democrats recognized that “penalty is a much-less-dangerous word than tax,” and so set out on "a strategy of lying.”
Gingrich ends his e-book with a stark warning entitled, “What we must do.”
“Obamacare is bad, but the Obama dishonesty is even more dangerous,” he writes. This election is about much more than a radical power grab designed to create a Washington-centered bureaucratic control of America on behalf of left-wing values.
“This election is also about a culture of corruption and dishonesty which threatens to undermine and replace the very fabric of American representative self-government.”
