Matt Welch in the New York Post on President Barack Obama's Disqualifying Lies

The New York Post asked me how I would explain at a dinner party one good reason why I won't be voting to re-elect President Barack Obama, so I chose as my causus belli the category of his lies. Excerpt from the short piece:

President Obama lied in his 2010 State of the Union Address when he said his administration had "excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs" (in fact, he had 40 ex-lobbyists then, and 54 now, according to the Washington Examiner's Timothy P. Carney). He lied that year when he said "We are on the path to cutting our deficits in half," and he's lying this year when he says his new plan would cut the deficit by $4.3 trillion (more like $2 trillion). Obama lied when he said his signature health-care plan represented a triumph of the little man over special interests (it was precisely the opposite). He lied when he said the Congressional Budget Office concluded that ObamaCare would reduce the deficit by $1 trillion (it's complicated, but no), and he, uh, forecasted incorrectly when he insisted that the typical family's insurance premiums would go down $2,500 a year (they have instead gone up).

The administration's reaction to the deadly Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi — lie, lie, lie and lie.

Space constraints prevented me from setting up that quadruple-lie accusation re: Benghazi. So here it is, with the relevant links:

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said on Sept. 14 that "we have no information to suggest that it was a preplanned attack." United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice said on Sept. 16 that the attack began "spontaneously in Benghazi," and was "sparked" by "the airing on the Internet of a very hateful, very offensive video." At the vice presidential debate Oct. 11, Joe Biden claimed "we weren't told" that Ambassador Chris Stevens et al "wanted more security." President Obama told Jon Stewart Oct. 18 that "every piece of information that we got, as we got it we laid it out for the American people."

I wrote about "Obama and the L-Word" in the April 2010 edition of Reason, and in June of that year at CNN Opinion I begged political reporters to scrutinize the president as much as they trained their B.S. detectors on Sarah Palin.