"I don’t remember ..."

The President had "no time" to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu next week, but he somehow found the time to attend a fat-cat fundraiser with Jay-Z and Beyonce this week. He also somehow wedged an appearance on David Letterman's late night TV show yesterday. In what was intended as a softball interview, Letterman asked about the debt and the deficit.

John Hinderacker comments:

A lot of politicians are dishonest, but Barack Obama may be in a league by himself. He appeared on the David Letterman show last night, and Letterman asked him about the national debt (somewhat surprisingly). Obama’s answer was a masterpiece of prevarication. He described how the debt originated, and claimed, falsely, that he inherited a $1 trillion deficit. In fact, this country had never run a[n] [annual] deficit anywhere near $1 trillion until FY 2009, the first year of the Obama administration. (And, no, Bush isn’t to blame for it; the Democratic Congress waited until Obama was in office to pass the vast majority of the bloated spending for that fiscal year.) Letterman, to his credit, went on to ask Obama how much the national debt actually is. Obama evidently knew that if he said $16 trillion his audience would be horrified, so, incredibly, he pretended not to know! You have to see it to believe it.

The exact quote from the President was: "“I don’t remember what the [debt] number was precisely.”

It's not surprising, really, that Obama couldn't remember the exact deficit figure. After all, $16 trillion is a mere pittance that can be mitigated easily by having "millionaires" pay their "fair share"—at least in the fantasy class warfare world of Barack Obama and his supporters. In reality, a $16 trillion debt (to which Obama added $1 trillion each year he has been President) is frighteningly large, made even scarier by the fact that when interest rates go up, (and they will, except in the fantasy world of the President) the cost to service the debt will cripple the federal budget and hurt the very people that Barack Obama professes to care so much about.

But no worries. The President was glib, smiled a lot, gave Letterman a pound, and was otherwise really, really cool. Too bad he's also really, really an economic incompetent.