Muscatine

Reporter Bob Woodward today penned a piece in the Washington Post confirming his previous reporting that despite misleading statements from President Obama and former White House Chief of Staff – and Treasury nominee – Jack Lew, the White House is indeed responsible for the stimulus.

The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.

Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.

White House press secretary Jay Carney admitted as much this week.

“The sequester was something that was discussed,” Carney said. Walking back the earlier statements, he added carefully, “and as has been reported, it was an idea that the White House put forward.”

Maybe someone in the White House finally got tired of denying the undeniable or Carney, a former journalist, couldn’t bear going to the mikes and contradicting the nation’s greatest living reporter, and he told somebody upstairs to take a hike.

But Obama himself continues to bemoan the sequester and accuse Republicans of responsibility for the cuts its “meat cleaver” – as he puts it – will inflict.

One day, Obamacare will go really, really bad. Fortunately, it’s named for the president, or he would be blaming the GOP for that too.

Actually, why should that stop him?

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