Eric Zuesse
Here was Obama’s rhetoric, in Tallinn Estonia, on 3 September 2014 (click on the linked parts to see the actual reality regarding each given allegation):
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We’re not afraid of free and fair elections, because true legitimacy can only come from one source — and that is the people. We’re not afraid of an independent judiciary, because no one is above the law. We’re not afraid of a free press or vibrant debate or a strong civil society. … And yet, as we gather here today, we know that this vision is threatened by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. It is a brazen assault on the territorial integrity of Ukraine — a sovereign and independent European nation. It challenges that most basic of principles of our international system — that borders cannot be redrawn at the barrel of a gun; that nations have the right to determine their own future. It undermines an international order where the rights of peoples and nations are upheld and can’t simply be taken away by brute force. This is what’s at stake in Ukraine. This is why we stand with the people of Ukraine today. (Applause.)
Now, let’s put to rest, once and for all, the distortions or outdated thinking that has caused this crisis. Our NATO Alliance is not aimed “against” any other nation; we’re an alliance of democracies dedicated to our own collective defense. Countries like Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania are not “post-Soviet territory.” You are sovereign and independent nations with the right to make your own decisions. No other nation gets to veto your security decisions.
The protests in Ukraine, on the Maidan, were not led by neo-Nazis or fascists. They were led by ordinary Ukrainians. …
As a result of state-run propaganda, many Russians have become convinced that the actions taken by their government is [are] strengthening Russia. … Just as we refused to accept smaller European nations being dominated by bigger neighbors in the last century, we reject any talk of spheres of influence today. (Applause.)
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Click onto each link there, and see that each one of those statements by Obama is a lie.
Many other lies were in that speech, but the core of his deception was this: his lying ‘history’ regarding the matter, and his lying about his intentions in it.
Obama’s most blatant lies concern foreign policy (the topic of that speech), not domestic policy. Anyone who trusts anything he says about international relations will be deceived, because he builds his foreign policies upon an agenda that is profoundly different from his rhetorically stated purposes. And, so, he needs to lie a lot, in order to argue for his foreign policies. And, he does.
However, there is a deeper context to this, and it’s Obama’s relationship to lying, itself – his attitude toward deceiving the public, and also the public’s acceptance of that attitude; and, ultimately, this concerns even the type of nation that the United States has become, and now sadly is:
President Obama had his Supreme Court attorney, the U.S. Solicitor General, present a friend-of-the-court brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of a claimant whose case alleged that political lying is 100% protected by the First Amendment’s Free Speech provision and so no state may issue any law limiting the right of anyone to lie in a political campaign. The U.S. Supreme Court, in the 2014 case of Susan B. Anthony List v. Dreihaus, issued a decison 9-to-0 (unanimous) endorsing that view: the public has no right to be provided the truth, but politicians and their monied backers have an unlimited right to deceive the public in any political campaign, the 9 ‘Justices’ unanimously agreed.
This Supreme Court case was virtually ignored by the U.S. ‘news’ media: there were a few snickering blog-posts about the oral arguments, but by the time the Court issued its ruling, even that coverage didn’t exist – as if the case were only a minor one, about a minor issue, rather than about the very possibility (or not) that democracy can actually function (in more than merely a nominal sense) in the United States.
By the time the final decision was issued, even the snickerers were no longer interested in the case. However, someone at the (Republican) Sean Hannity online forums celebrated (and with links to the sources, moreover) the ultimate end of the case after it went back to the lower court, and he noted: “Based on that [Supreme Court] ruling, the case was filed and a Federal Judge has now struck down the Ohio law [against lying in politics] as being an unconstitutional burden on electoral speech.”
And, so, anyone in American politics who is accused of lying can say, “So, what?” and, if there is more money for the lie than against it, then the lie will probably win. And there can be no legal consequences against that victory for lies, and for liars. This is now American ‘democracy.’ In order to change it, the Constitution would now have to be amended.
This is not what the Founders intended, when they wrote the First Amendment; but what they intended has been raped by this U.S. Supreme Court on a number of occasions, the two worst of which have been 2010’s Citizens United decision, and 2014’s Susan B. Anthony List v. Dreihaus decision. Those two decisions complement each other in raping America’s Founders, by one rapist after another, from the same Supreme Court gang: one decision replaces one-person-one-vote by one-dollar-one-vote, and the other provides total impunity when those dollars are then devoted to spreading political lies to the public.
So: America is now a fascist country. The Big Dollar has now become even the Big Lie, in America.
What remains, in America, of the Founders’ intent, isn’t enough to be honestly called a “democracy.” And, of course, when President Obama was in Estonia, he was lying about that, too. And his pro-‘democracy’ rhetoric has been quite successful around the world, at fooling publics in many countries into thinking that he favors democracy. And the same rhetorical line, which has been stated by all U.S. Presidents (some of whom believed it, unlike he), has produced a generally positive image of the United States around the world; though, anomalously, the U.S. is also considered to be the nation that constitutes the greatest threat to world peace.
Perhaps after two war-seeking Presidents during the past 15 years (George W. Bush and Barack Obama), global public opinion about the U.S. is gradually changing, and America is coming to be viewed as a declining world power that’s increasingly trying to impose its will upon the world, even at the cost of waging perpetual war, after the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact were long gone and America’s ‘defense’ industry needs invasions in order to continue growing. However, The international image of Obama is still much better than is the international image of Bush. Obama is a far more skillful liar than his predecessor was. But they both have played the public for suckers, and in the same general direction, though one a conservative and the other a ‘not conservative’ (in rhetoric, which fools the public even on ideology). (Both have been lying war-mongers, no different than Hillary Clinton would be if she becomes President.)
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.