In one of those through the looking glass moments that you only can run across in political discourse, the president's press secretary tried to paint the president's request to cut $100 million from his budget request as "huge".
It's not that it's a small number, it's just that it is 1/35,000th of the president's budget request and he didn't even want to do that except as a PR manipulation as so many are upset about his budget size. (click here to go to Jake Tapper's blog for discussion)
We know this because as Jake Tapper of ABC news adroitly pointed out during a press conference very recently the same administration labeled an $8 billion inclusion in the budget as "insignificant".
While this all may seem like old news it is disturbingly demonstrative of the level of a sliding scale of truth that seems to be emanating from the Obama administration.
We have received some comments from readers about the president persisting and referring to 90% of the weapons in Mexico as coming from the United States, which is at best a willful misapplication of the figures context.
90% of the firearms turned over by the Mexican government for tracing within the United States came from the United States, not much of a shock. The real story is that the majority of the weapons used by Mexico's drug cartels come from other sources than purchases made at legitimate guns shops in the United States.
This is obviously true since the cartels possess fully automatic weapons, grenade launchers and rocket propelled grenades which are not usually part and parcel of the stock at your neighborhood sportsman's warehouse.
Some surmise that a sizable percentage of these type of weapons are made in the United States but have been given to Mexico's military and police by the United States government where they are then either sold by corrupt officials to Mexican drug gangs or stolen or both. None of these types of weapons are submitted by the Mexican government for "tracing" in the United States.
This consistent level of misstatement, if it can be called that, only contributes to the public distrust of any economic bailout policies announced by this administration.
The simple story is just as our grandparents told all of us-- if someone lies about one thing they will lie about something else.
