Let's Go To the Tape

Trey Smith

I don't know what it is with politicians and government leaders these days. They act as if most of us just fell off of a turnip truck!

We live in a world awash in videos, pictures, sound bites, leaks and transcripts. News is at our fingertips 24/7. Unlike the days of yore, it's far easier to catch these people when they outright lie or, at least, try to mislead us. All we have to do is go to the tape.

Take, for example, the Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare) that was recently upheld by the US Supreme Court. On one side we have Mitt Romney. He says he opposes this Act and he has always opposed it. The only problem with his current assertion is that it is patently untrue!

As most people know, he led the fight to have a similar piece of legislation approved in his state when he was Governor of Massachusetts. There literally are scores of newspaper articles and taped interviews from that time that clearly show that he was for it before he was against it (after he left office).

Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he will look you dead in the eye to claim that he never supported it.

Barack Obama is just as bad!

President Barack Obama's campaign spokesman said Thursday that Obama disagrees with the Supreme Court's characterization of his health care law's individual mandate as a tax.

Ben LaBolt, appearing on CNN's "Starting Point with Soledad O'Brien," said Obama still believes the fee assessed to people who choose not to obtain health insurance should be classified as a "penalty" rather than a "tax."

"You saw our arguments before the Supreme Court," LaBolt said. "You see what the president has said over the past several years that it's a penalty for that 1% of the population who can afford health insurance but hasn't chosen to get it."

Asked whether Obama "disagrees with the Supreme Court decision that says it's now a tax," LaBolt said "that's right."

"He's said it was a penalty," LaBolt continued. "You saw our arguments before the court."

LaBolt asserted that the government's lawyers never argued the penalty for not obtaining insurance was a "tax," despite the Court's ruling that it could only be upheld under Congress' taxation powers.

In spite of LaBolt's repetitious assertion, we know that what he is contending is not true. Transcripts from the oral arguments before the US Supreme Court show that Solicitor General Donald B. Verrelli, Jr., argued that very thing. Not only did he include this argument in his oral remarks, but it was included as well in his written legal brief. It's all there in black-and-white.

And yet, here we have a presidential spokesperson contending that it isn't true.

What is it with these people?!?