Obama uses his words to craft his own alternate reality

On President Barack Obama’s first day in office he declared, “Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.” In 2013, Politifacts voted, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” as the “Lie of the Year.” In April of 2014, a Fox News poll asked registered voters, “How often does Barack Obama lie to the country on important matters?” Thirty-seven percent said he lied “most of the time,” twenty-four percent said “some of the time,” and twenty percent thought “now and then”—translating into eight in ten respondents believing their President lies to them, to some degree, on important matters.

Why does President Obama continue to deceive the American people? And why doesn’t it seem to matter to him?

{mosads}For starters, throughout his presidency, Mr. Obama has practiced a convenient kind of “truth”—his seemingly fervent belief that he can alter reality and shape the world by the simple utterance and power of his words. Speech becomes fact, pronouncement becomes truth, and statement becomes law—as he bends and rearranges issues, events and narratives to coincide with his personal ideology and sense of what America should be.

Sweeping proclamations come down almost as if accompanied by trumpets and drums: “I’ve done more for Israel’s security than any President ever”; “I didn’t set a red line, the world set a red line”; “The world is less violent than it has ever been”; “It’s (Afghanistan) not going to be a source of terrorist attacks again”; “ISIL is not Islamic.” He says it and so it shall be.

It is a personal paradigm where there is very little remorse for playing with the truth, because in his model most Americans are considered as adolescents—who don’t know how to act independently or make independent decisions, and, as children, the complete truth is not their concern and should be held from them. It is a world where a cerebral, disengaged President has decided it is his proper place to make the laws, interpret the laws, and enforce the laws. We should be grateful and, like it or not, it is for our own good.

So, why do people with great power feel they can say certain things with impunity—regardless of the truth? Without making comparisons, perhaps some answers lie in a psychological profile of an equally famous and powerful leader prepared by the Office of Strategic Services during WWII —a wartime intelligence agency and precursor of the CIA:

According to the OSS the leader’s primary rules were: “never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there might be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”

That leader was Adolph Hitler.

In the end, President Obama has the right to express his vision for America in the language of his choice. But language is a conceptual tool, and its truth rests on the truth of its concepts. As only reason can validate one’s concepts, those truths can never be faked or manipulated or wished into being simply by making assertions, repeating them, and expecting the universe to follow.

Such a stance puts a man out of touch with reality. 

La Valle is freelance writer in New York.

The views expressed by Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.