Can Obama Be Trusted? Probably.

From the moment that Bill Clinton began his run for the White House in 1992, the GOP was warning voters that the man could not be trusted. For all of his charm and knowledge, he was simply an individual with a propensity for fibbing profusely in order to advance his political career and agenda. We told you. You didn’t listen. Seven years later, we were proven right in a big way.

Devastated that their president had been outed as a liar, liberals and Democrats were salivating at the prospect of catching George W. Bush lying to the American public. At this juncture, most of them have deluded themselves into thinking that they did. At some point, the American left decided that there was no difference between being wrong and intentionally misleading people. Having disposed of that inconvenient differentiation, the left has spent the last eight years calling Bush every name in the book. Moronic bookstore propaganda categorizing all of the bad intelligence that the administration cited about WMD’s,are penned labeling the mistakes as lies. It’s maddening to anyone with half a brain or any ability or desire to do real research. Once again, if anyone has real evidence that George W. Bush has lied about anything during his administration, I will send you a crisp $100 bill. That’s a promise.

Hillary Clinton became the Democratic frontrunner as soon as John Kerry flip-flopped his way back to the Senate. Like her husband, Hillary fibbed constantly, in a seemingly pathological way. It’s as if she had seen her husband do it so many times that she figured it would work for her as well. Of course Hillary doesn’t have half the charisma that Bill does, and with simple research at every blogger's fingertips these days, she didn’t have a prayer of getting away with the same sort of B.S. as the former president.

Two huge whoppers come to mind. The first was the well known “sniper-fire” lie. The incredible thing about this one was that it was a washed-up comedian who brought the lie to our attention. When Sinbad is proven to be more trustworthy than your party’s presidential frontrunner, it’s time to rethink your options, which of course the Democrats did.

However, my favorite incident highlighting Hillary’s difficulty in telling the truth was when she lied about her own name. It sounds impossible, I know, but it actually happened. At an early campaign stop, the former first lady told a crowd that she was named after Mt. Everest pioneer, Sir. Edmund Hillary. When it came out that she had actually been born several years before anyone had heard of the man, I felt sorry for the gal. Seriously, to go that long without a first name must be extremely hard for a young child.

At some point in the campaign, Bill must have decided that Hillary was stealing his thunder as fabricator-in-chief. Betting that the American people had the long-term memory of a gerbil, he told us that he had been against the Iraq war from the start. Huh?

So what about the man who would be king? With the economic crisis propelling Barack Obama to what appears will be an electoral victory, is it too late to ask if he is honest and trustworthy?

In the wake of Obama’s 30-minute, TV love fest on Tuesday, many on my side, in a fit of election week madness, tried to label Obama’s decision to go back on his promise to fund his campaign using public financing, as a lie. It really wasn’t. Unless you believe Obama knew all along that thousands of five-year olds were going to empty their piggy banks in support of him, it was probably just a greed induced broken promise. If he does a lot of that as President, we're going to have a problem, but it’s no reason to label him as a liar.

His claim that William Ayer’s was “just a guy who lived in my neighborhood” came pretty close to crossing the line and Obama's since-abandoned talking point about John McCain wanting to fight a 100 year war in Iraq, can accurately be described as an egregious and misleading misrepresentation of what McCain actually said. These half-truths, however, are par for the course during campaign season and, as an honest observer of our nation’s political discourse, I can say that I believe Obama to be an honest man.

I trust that he’s going to do what he says he’s going to do. He’s going to raise taxes. He’s going to hold talks with the Mullahs without preconditions. He’s going to renegotiate NAFTA. He’s going to do all of these really dumb things and no one is going to stop him. Why? Because “Hope”, “Change”, “George Bush”, Fist –bump.

Call me old fashioned, but I believe that character matters immensely in making a choice as to who should serve in our nation’s highest office. Barack Obama’s character flaws are big ones. He has exhibited exceedingly poor judgment when it comes to who he associates with and has put politics above doing what’s right for the country on several foreign policy issues of the utmost importance.

But a liar? I don’t believe so. Not anywhere close to the perpetually pathological duo of Bill and Hillary. In that sense, as bad as an Obama presidency may be, we probably dodged quite a bullet on the honesty front.

-Dan Joseph

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