Rep. Tom Price, Republican of Georgia, has what you might call a loose grip on the truth. In just the last year, for instance, he has cited a sham study to attack Obamacare, warned about the health and economic impacts of gay rights, and declared that “there is not one woman” without access to birth control.
He has also shown a penchant for Tea Party “America is doomed” rhetoric, such as his warning last year that the Affordable Care Act “removes the very freedom and liberty that our founders fought for at its very core” and will destroy “the America that you and I love.”
Price combined these two traits in an interview with conservative bloggers at Red State today, in which he completely made up facts about the stimulus bill and the deaths of dimplomats in Benghazi in order to argue that the Obama administration has “led to what many people have called a government that no longer has the consent of the governed.” This missing trust, he says, is what “allows a democracy to stand.”
Price started out by claiming that funds in the 2009 stimulus bill were spent on “things that didn’t improve the economy, that didn’t turn things around, that didn’t decrease unemployment.” In fact, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and many leading economists found that the bill did, in fact, do all three of those things.
Well, it’s because they’ve been deceived. The American people have been deceived by this administration and by what their policies were. And it all started with the stimulus bill, that was a non-stimulus bill that took hundreds of billions of dollars, nearly a trillion dollars, and spent it on things that didn’t improve the economy, that didn’t turn things around, that didn’t decrease unemployment, in spite of the testimonials of the president and those in his administration. So that was the first part.
And then came all of the healthcare debate over a year and a half, culminating in Congress passing a bill that the American people didn’t want at that time and still don’t want. It has led to what many people have called a government that no longer has the consent of the governed, and it’s that trust that’s so absolutely vital between the people and their government that allows a democracy to stand. And so, it needs to be recovered, and that’s why I call on the president immediately to get out in front on these issues, come clean, admit where the errors were made and the mistakes were made.
He then moved on, of course, to Benghazi, repeating the completely debunked right-wing myth that the Obama administration told Special Forces to, as Price puts it, “stand down and don’t go protect Americans.”
It’s hard to say that the cover-up is always worse than the deed, when you have four Americans who were murdered without the administration doing anything to go to their aid and protect them. Not because the assets weren’t there or the opportunities weren’t there, but because somebody in the administration said, ‘It’s time to stand down and don’t go protect Americans.’ This is incredibly important, again, it gets to that huge trust issue. But it does keep snowballing because the administration refuses to come clean, the president refuses to take responsibility for what happened. This is absolutely unconscionable.
And I think now, with the IRS and with Benghazi as it is, and now with the AP story that we’ve just gotten out, that the Department of Justice tapped and got records, phone records, from 20-plus AP reporters, now the mainstream media is brought into the fray, and they realize that this administration is wayward and, as somebody has described, drunk with power. And that we will now see a much more critical view of the administration from the press.
