Barack Obama: A Life of Lies

That everyone lies is a commonsense notion supported by psychological research.   But while everyone lies occasionally, few people lie chronically.  Most refrain from habitual lying due to moral sense and/or from fear that others will discover their lies and punish them.

To succeed as a professional liar then, one must develop two essential skills.  First, he needs to insulate his conscience from information that challenges his lies.   Second, he must be supremely confident that his audience is so naive as to accept the lies and that they are unwilling or incapable of retaliating should they discover his deceptions.

In his quasi-autobiographical book Dreams from My Father that he is admits is fabricated in parts, Barack Obama unwittingly describes some roots of his lying character.  Barack, then called "Barry," explains his lying ways and his fear of being caught in lies by his father's visit to his 5^th grade classroom.  Jon Meacham in an August 22 2008 Time article entitled “What Barack Obama Learned from His Father” summarizes the episode nicely:

Obama was not delighted by the visit. He dreaded it. He had boasted that he came from African royalty, and that his father was a prince. "My grandfather, see, he's a chief," Barry had told his classmates. "It's sort of like the king of the tribe, you know … like the Indians. So that makes my father a prince. He'll take over when my grandfather dies." The truth was more mundane—tragically mundane, in Barry's view. The Obamas were Luo, a nomadic tribe that, as Barry recalled, "raised cattle and lived in mud huts and ate corn meal and yams and something called millet. Their traditional costume was a leather thong across the crotch." Told that Miss Hefty had invited Obama Sr. to the class to talk about life in Kenya, Barry was crushed: his tale of princely blood would be exposed, he feared, by the harsh reality of mud huts. "I couldn't imagine worse news," Obama wrote of the invitation to his father. "I spent that night and all of the next day trying to suppress thoughts of the inevitable … all my lies exposed, the painful jokes afterward. Each time I remembered, my body squirmed as if it had received a jolt to the nerves."

Please note the content of young Barack’s lies.  At age ten, his deception does not concern age-consistent desire.  He is not lying to avoid punishment for some infraction and he is not lying to take possession of some material good.  No.  Barack Obama is lying to feed his fragile self-esteem and to enhance his identity.  The issue is one of tenuous, conflicted identity, a desperate attempt to prove first to himself and then to others that he is special and worthy of adulation.  The lie reveals both the fragile narcissism and nascent megalomania that comprise the foundation of Barack Hussein Obama’s personality.

So Obama has had the requisite character to be a successful liar.  But a successful liar demands a gullible audience.   

It was here that Barack Obama truly shined.  He realized intuitively that biracial persons are a true minority, one with a miniscule constituency.  Barack could not be successful as a biracial candidate.  He needed to be black in order to profit from black enthusiasm and white guilt.  No one would dare question a black man.  No one would dare call a black man a liar, for to do so would open them up to charges of vile racism.  And Obama was proved correct when in November 2009, during the President’s health care speech, Representative Joe Wilson from South Carolina shouted "You lie," was set upon as if by all the dogs from hell, and shamed into recanting his criticism.

Interesting that Wilson had chosen to focus on healthcare lies, since Obama’s healthcare lies now are center stage.  Interesting that Barry Barack Obama, the child, feared that the father who gave him physical life would be the one to expose his lies when for President Barack Hussein Obama, the adult, it is the media who gave him electoral life that has exposed his lies.  For in the December16, 2013 ultra-liberal Washington Post, Glenn Kessler described Obama as having uttered the first, third, and fifth most egregious political lies of the year:  (Number One) “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it.”  (Number Three) “The Capitol Hill janitors just got a pay cut” and (Number Five) “The day after Benghazi happened, I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism.”

The lying, identity-conflicted, narcissistic, megalomaniacal Barry Obama, then, continues to inhabit the body and mind of Barack Obama.   The President still is fully capable of professional shameless prevarication.  But maybe, just maybe, the previously lie-colluding press and ultra-liberal electorate are beginning to see Obama for the double-speaking demagogue that he always has been.