Have Some Madeira M’Dear: Addendum to Implausible Deniability

This administration and its minions have been caught in so many distortions, exaggerations and just plain lies that keeping track is becoming a full time job. Here are a few more to add to the ever-growing list.

Number Problems

Home Land Security Secretary Janet Napolitano criticized an AP report citing the release of more than 2,000 illegal immigrants due to the Sequester. She said the number was “not that accurate” and that “several hundred were related to sequester,” but “it wasn’t thousands.”

Director of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, John Morton, testifying before a House Appropriations subcommittee, had a different set of numbers. Morton said that more than 2,228 illegal immigrants were released during three weeks in February. He said the release was driven by the looming sequester. He also stated that among the released were those being held on theft charges, financial crimes and drunken driving – in some cases multiple instances of drunken driving.

Morton also said the released illegals would still be deported and are “required” to appear for upcoming court hearings.

Good luck with that.

Another Obama administration official who has had to feast on his words is Sec. of Education Arne Duncan. Duncan claimed that thousands of teachers were getting pink slips because of the sequester. He said that as many as 40,000 teachers could lose their jobs. Even the Washington Post found that one a little too big to swallow. It turns out that the Department of Education could not come up with the name of a single district in which such notices had been delivered.

Duncan of course said he misspoke. Maybe with all these Democrats having problems expressing themselves the party should consider employing a speech therapist, full time. At least that would be one job they could truthfully claim added by this administration.

If You’re White, Take a Hike

Then there is the just released Office of Inspector General Report on the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. The 250-page report found the division run by Tom Perez, probable Obama nominee for Sec. of Labor, riddled with racial politics and partisanship. Perez is on record telling OIG…

“that he believed interpreting the retrogressive-effect prong of the analysis to cover White citizens would be inconsistent with the history of and intent behind Section 5, which he stated was enacted to remedy the specific problem of discrimination against racial minorities. In his February 2011 letter, Perez noted that the Division has always understood the term “minority” to mean not numerical minority, but rather “an identifiable and specially disadvantaged group.”

PJ Media succinctly summarized the OIG Report.

“Though the report commenced as an investigation into the New Black Panther dismissal, seemingly every rock the investigators turned over resulted in more creatures fleeing the sunshine.” 

Sequester Redux  

Finally, the president is so busy walking back his claims of sequester Armageddon that he is tripping over himself. His warning that Americans would feel “immediate, painful spending cuts” has morphed into ““It’s conceivable that in the first week, the first two weeks, the first three weeks, the first month … a lot of people may not notice the full impact of the sequester.”

All those dire predictions were supposed to force Republicans to cave and when they didn’t even some Obama’s media cheer leaders began to doubt his veracity.

No doubt he will do his best to make the cuts as painful as possible.

Sing Along with Obama

Right now, facing a March 27 deadline, when the current short-term budget extension expires and a government shutdown looms, the president is (belatedly) making nice on Republicans.

Republicans, on the other hand, can’t decide if Obama is really extending an olive branch or whether he intends to bash them over the head with it.

A verse from an old Flanders and Swann, song, “Have Some Madeira M’dear” comes to mind:

Have  some Madeira M’dear
I have a small cask of it here…

Stay tuned.