Obama Administration Most Transparent in History, More Than One of Three Americans Believe: Who Are These People?

In Stephen Colbert’s
(in)famous roast of President Bush at the 2006 White House
Correspondents’ Dinner, the comedian compared the president’s
approval ratings, in the 30s, to a glass half (or rather
two-thirds) empty, pointing out that “the last third is usually
backwash.”  So maybe, then,
the 37 percent of Americans that still believe Obama’s claim
that this is the “most transparent administration in history” are
mostly backwash.

The claim, after all, is patently untrue. The administration’s
aggressive pursuit of whistleblowers (they’ve prosecuted
more than twice the number of people for government leaks than
all previous administrations combined) contradicts the
transparency claim. The fact that Obama says he welcomes the debate
ignited by Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA, and was

going to do it anyway, even as that leaker is a fugitive
contradicts the transparency claim.
Reporting
from Reason
contradicts the
transparency claim.

Presidents lie. That oft-repeated, rarely-heeded, truism has
been used to defend some of President Obama’s other lies. CNN’s LZ
Granderson, for example,
dismissed the president’s broken promise about keeping your
health plan (which PolitiFact belatedly
declared the lie of the year this year) as just something
presidents “have” to do sometimes. Other Obama apologists
objected to Granderson’s claim; the president wasn’t lying.
They say, and some of them must actually believe, that it’s not a
lie because the plans being dropped aren’t the “same” plans people
had when the promise was made, even though they’ve had continuous
coverage from then until their plan was dropped due to Obamacare.
The transparency lie is much harder to delude yourself into
believing. Yet apparently 37 percent of Americans manage to do so,
or are just clueless. It’s as good a reason as any to
donate to Reason, which is on the front lines of exposing this
and other lies, from politicians on both sides of the aisle, so
that the voting public might be better informed about the people
trying to manipulate and mislead them.