The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”Read the rest here.
The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two days later.
“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”
The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.
I love the way Woodward uses every possible linguistic alternative to avoid saying what he actually means... the Obama administration has been lying through their teeth.
I imagine the reason that he uses so much circumlocution is to leave himself plausible deniability. You see, he does not really know who proposed what when, and neither does anyone else at this point. This way, if someone calls him on it, he can say "what, I never accused him of lying."
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