President Obama took on Fox News/Republican Party lie machine with a powerful debunking of conservative fiction during a speech on the economy in red state Indiana.
Video:
https://youtu.be/S8r0hVKt9B8?t=34m5s
First, the President delivered the facts:
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By almost every economic measure, America is better off than when I came here at the beginning of my presidency. That the truth. It’s true. Over the past six years, our businesses have created more than 14 million new jobs. That’s the longest stretch of sustained private sector job growth in our history. We’ve seen the first sustained manufacturing growth since the 1990s. We cut unemployment in half, years before a lot of economists thought we could. We cut the oil that we buy from foreign countries by more than half. Doubled the clean energy that we produce. For the first time ever, ninety-percent of the country has health insurance. In fact, a poll that was out just last week says that two out of every three Americans think their own family’s financial situation is in pretty good shape.
Obama went on to debunk the story about the economy that Republicans are selling, “Their basic story is America’s working class, America’s middle-class, families like yours have victimized by a big bloated federal government run by a bunch of left-wing elitists like me. And the government’s taking your hard earned tax dollars, and it’s giving them to freeloaders and welfare cheats, and we’re strangling business with endless regulations, and this federal government is letting immigrants and foreigners steal whatever jobs Obamacare hasn’t killed yet.”
Later, President Obama added, “Now, I haven’t turned on Fox News or listened to conservative talk radio yet today, but I’ve turned them on enough over the past seven and a half years to know I’m not exaggerating in terms of their story. That’s the story they tell. You can hear it from just about every member of Congress on the other side of the aisle. Instead of telling you what they’re for, they’ve defined their economic agenda by what they’re against, and that’s mainly being against me. And they’re basic message is anti-government, anti-immigrant, anti-trade, and let’s face it, anti-change.”
Obama then busted the Republican myths that the federal government is growing, the budget deficit is growing, there are more families on welfare, and Obamacare has harmed the economy and the middle-class.
President Obama has never taken on the Republican myth machine as directly as he did in Indiana. What Obama’s speech highlighted was the remarkable fact that the Republican Party is running on a platform that is a fantasy. President Obama directly debunked the Republican lie that he is harming business with regulations by pointing out that he has issued the fewest regulations since Ulysses S. Grant.
Republicans, fueled by Fox News and conservative talk radio, have created a fictional America that needs to be saved from the Obama years. President Obama responded to the Republican myths and lies with a sledgehammer of reality to destroy the imaginary universe that Republicans are living in.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
