Does Obama Think He Is Lying?

In Michael Agar’s book entitled Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation, he asks “[h]ow do you speak and act a lie at the same time?” Agar maintains that there

are three characteristics of an act that tell … whether a lie occurred or not: I. The sentence is false; 2. The person knows it’s false; 3. The person intends to deceive. A lie isn’t just what’s in the discourse; it’s also what’s in the circumstances of the act of speaking, like the knowledge and intentions of the speaker.

Furthermore, “the thing that most people would say makes a lie — the sentence is false –turns out to be less important than the speaker’s knowledge and intentions. The thing that’s most important in figuring out whether something’s a lie is what the speakers were trying to do, not the literal truth or falsity of the words and sentences that they said.”

While Americans are shocked by the apparent misleading misrepresentations in Obamacare, were they actually lied to or did they merely engage in profound self-deception?

Didn’t Obama tell us who he was from the beginning? Is he really lying, from his vantage point? He is clearly a product of a socialist/Marxist background. He has vilified capitalism from the outset. He publicly stated that he favors a single-payer health-care system. Is he not fulfilling the total transformation of America as he promised from the outset? Who is lying to whom? Is Obama a palterer who talks deceitfully or is he merely engaging in Barry-speak? After all, if he never intended ObamaCare to be concerned with health care, he is being truthful all along since his end game is the destruction of the American health care system. Does the old adage that a person “can believe anything he puts his mind to,” have some truth in it after all? Is Obama, in fact, engaging in a true lie or a truthful lie?

Dodging, evading, hedging the data, and sidestepping questions have been evident in Obama’s linguistic assertions from the very beginning. But whose responsibility was it to mine the truth from his mincing of the truth?

Did Obama speak falsely or did too many Americans listen poorly? After all, “the liar is trying to lie successfully and we want to believe [him] so we do. There are no obstacles.”

In the natural world, deception is a life-saving exercise. For example, “[t]he Tawny Frogmouth is camouflaged to look like the tree upon which it is perched to deceive its predators and hide itself during the day.”

Given Obama’s fragmented childhood, has the boy in him who had to protect himself from a loss of his father, a distant mother, and a confused identity, merely evolved into the man who uses protective language coloration to shield himself? Studies show that by five or six years of age, children become quite adept at lying. Could it be that in Obama’s universe “not telling the truth is much more complex than just lying, because [one may ask] is there an absolute truth?” After all, this article at Salon manages to avoid the details of ObamaCare when it claims that “No, Obama didn’t lie to you about your health care plan.”