Tea bags will not stop this

A very insightful piece by Peter Wehner, "Decoding Obama" (Commentary), begins thus:

In the course of only five months, President Obama has reached into his bag and pulled out a dazzling number of misleading rhetorical tricks.

Let’s begin with his much-touted claim that his Administration is responsible for having “saved or created” at least 150,000 American jobs, even though we have shed well over a million jobs since Obama took office. Jesus may have turned water into wine – but even He did not claim to have turned job losses into job gains. That is the picture Obama is trying to portray. Of course, to place an empirical figure on the number of jobs Obama has “saved” is risible; if Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush had tried to get away with such a stunt, they would have been ridiculed and criticized mercilessly. Among the largely supine and compliant Obama press corps, however, the claim is reported as if it were written on tablets of stone.

... and the rest is well-worth reading. Then, Wehner followed that up by a piece entitled "Still decoding Obama" (Commentary), in which he writes:

In reading more of his comments, I’ve noticed a tendency that now almost qualifies as a reflex: the more strongly the president denies something — and especially, the more he mocks his critics and feigns amusement at what they say — the greater the odds are that he will do what he denies.

... Here’s the thing, though: in every one of these instances Obama is not only doing something different than what he said, he’s doing very nearly the opposite of what he says. Obama’s “light touch” is turning out to be as intrusive a set of actions by the federal government as we have seen. He is “growing government” in record-shattering ways. Facing a staggering deficit and debt, Obama has decided to hit the accelerator rather than pump the brakes when it comes to federal spending. Facing a deficit and debt he calls unsustainable, Obama is adding trillions to them. He actually is running GM. He really is trying to engineer a government takeover of health care. His health-care plan may be the single worst thing he could do for America’s long-term fiscal health. And his Justice Department has acknowledged that FBI agents have read terrorist suspects their Miranda rights.

... [Obama] uses soothing words that come across as reassuring and reasonable. The problem comes when you examine what he says versus what he does. And by that standard, Mr. Obama is turning out to be almost promiscuously misleading. He is not yet Bill Clinton, who belongs in a category all his own — but Obama is taking up residence in the same zip code, which is troubling enough. And for those of us who thought Obama, whatever his political ideology, would bring intellectual integrity to his words and his tenure, it is disappointing. It is hardly the change we were promised. But I imagine that it will catch up with him sooner or later — and when it does, the man who promised to be the antidote to cynicism will only deepen it.

[Hat tip to Prof. E.E.]