Barack Obama has taken to misquoting Republican House members on the student loan issue to distort and misrepresent their statements. Predictably, the left media are largely abetting his effort.
Obama told a North Carolina crowd, “One Republican congresswoman … said she had ‘very little tolerance for people who tell me they graduate with debt because there’s no reason for that.’ I’m just quoting here, I’m just quoting.” Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., actually said, “I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that.” Law and medical students might quibble with that, but Obama completely changed her meaning.
In Iowa, Obama railed, “You’ve got one member of Congress who compared these student loans — I’m not kidding here — to a ‘stage-three cancer of socialism.’” Rep. Todd Aiken, R-Mo., actually said, “America has got the equivalent of stage-three cancer of socialism because the federal government is tampering in all kinds of stuff it has no businesses tampering in.”
As you can see, Obama significantly changed the meaning of what Foxx and Aiken said to score political points. It’s disgraceful, it’s unpresidential, and, sadly, it’s utterly unsurprising.
