What I don't think you realize is that when you do your fact-checking on right-wing web sites, they're just going to feed you what you want to hear. This goes back to what O'Reilly surprisingly said about talking heads getting paid to say whichever views their producers want them to. There is no true journalistic conviction anymore, they're all mercenaries. Of course, I found it ironic coming from his own mouth when he's one of the top dogs at
Fox News.
Obama isn't a dictator. Just because he's president doesn't mean he "runs" things. There is a system of checks and balances, which ultimately proved to be a bricky system, but I can't blame the founding fathers for partisan politics.
Did Democrats have control of the House and Senate until 2010? Yes, but did Republicans know how to use a filibuster? A single senator could anonymously halt proceedings, forcing not a simple majority of at least 51 votes, but instead requiring 66 votes to pass the motion.
- So in your list of facts and figures, you failed to actually report on the deficit. I will let you do your own fact-searching here to show me how Obama doubled the deficit. Unless you just want to believe me when I say that the deficit has actually decreased under Obama.
- National debt is correct. As much as Republicans like to paint Democrats as the big-spenders, many Republicans fail to realize how "democratic" Bush was with his spending. And much of this spending was essentially done on borrowed money, namely both wars, the expansion of medicare, and his tax cuts for the wealthy.
Speaking of these tax cuts, which Obama WANTED to let expire in 2010 when they were originally meant to, how did that policy work out under Bush? Unemployment went up under Bush. Why the fudge do I keep hearing about these tax cuts for the wealthy creating jobs? This isn't ancient history, this is from the past decade, although in this day and age, ten years is more like the equivalent of 20-30 since many Americans have the attention spans of dogs in heat.
Lowering taxes is a hand-out, whether you want to call it that or not. I understand that the right will claim they want to decrease spending, but the fact that raising taxes is completely off the table seems irresponsible and unrealistic. In fact, defense spending is one of the most wasteful in our budget, yet despite that, Ryan kept claiming that the defense budget has gone down under Obama. Again, when we have a tax cut, we have to PAY FOR IT. That is a loss in revenue and we can't keep cutting and cutting it.
- Food stamps. Let me ask you, if after one of the worst recessions in our country I told you that the amount of people using food stamps was the same as pre-recession, would that be surprising? Food stamps are supposed to be a safety net program, so wouldn't it stand to reason that after an economic crisis, more people would fall into that safety net? Or are you trying to say that Obama is being driven in his limo throwing food stamps out his windows in poor neighborhoods?
I would expect this number to go up no matter who the president is, and the fact that the right making this a partisan issue is easy proof that they're not interested in fixing what's wrong, but instead are interested in making the current president look as bricky as possible so that he doesn't get re-elected. This obstructionism top to bottom, and also explains the fact that congress tried to repeal Obamacare 34 times. Is that really who you want in congress?
- Where the hell are you getting 8.3%? You're not one of those conspiracy theorists who think that the numbers were cooked, are you? It's 7.8%, but hey, I see how our president has actually made Republicans seem so GHod damn unpatriotic.
- Median household income. This one's easy. Remember that time the housing market bubble popped? That happened under Bush. You're just describing the tail-end of that crash. By the way, I agree with conservatives when they blame Clinton for weakening regulation before Bush took office.
- As leeds already alluded to, the notion that the president is able to control gas prices simply proves that the right is clutching at straws.
With that said, Obama hasn't been perfect, but he's been far from a fudge-up.