Things That Aren't So

President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have been talking a lot about how the Republicans — especially those in the House of Representatives — wnat to shut down the government because, they say, the Republicans oppose all government. They claim the Republicans are insisting the Senate meet their demands or the government will be shut down. And their compatriots in the mainstream media parrot these claims.

But there's a problem with these claims. Part of it is that it's Barack Obama and Harry Reid who have said they won't negotiate at all, not the Republicans. Their idea of a deal is their opponents accede to their demands. Yes, Harry Reid is demanding that House Republicans take orders from him, or the government will be shut down. The Republicans have offered various different proposals.

So, in reality, who's being intransigent? Who is, in reality, trying to produce a government shutdown?

President Obama and Senator Reid say they want to preserve Obamacare unchanged. Indeed,

Mr. Obama also refuses to bend on any part of ObamaCare — except when he unilaterally announces bending in his own political interest. He decided on his own, and contrary to the plain text of the law, to delay for a year the business mandate to provide insurance for employees. He also unilaterally delayed verifying the income of Americans seeking subsidies. He did this to pile more people into the ObamaCare exchanges, lest they fail, and to limit the harm to job creation before 2014.

Yet now he'd rather see the government shut down than accept the ObamaCare compromises that House Republicans have put in their latest government funding bill. He refuses to delay the law for a year though his own actions reveal it is not ready for prime time. And he won't even accept repeal of the medical-device tax that 79 Senators, including 33 Democrats, are on record as supporting. The tax is already hurting innovation and sending jobs overseas.

That's not even counting Obama's unilateral delay in the law's caps on patient out-of-pocket expenses (contrary to the provisions of the law), the waiver from Obamacare's provisions he gave to Congress and its staffers (violating Constitutional equal protection provisions), and all the waivers he and his head of the Health & Human Services Department have given to all his union friends. Perhaps Obama and Reid think unionists and Congressmen (and their staffs) are "more equal than others."

Yet these folks keep saying Obamacare will be good for everyone and good for the country. But

if Obamacare is so great, why don’t Congress and President Obama have to enroll in it? If it’s good enough for the rest of the country, Huelskamp said, “it should be good enough for the President of the United States.”

Sounds like more regime dishonesty to me. And yet another violation of Constitutional equal protection.

Obama and Reid want to blame the Republicans, but

it takes two to tangle, and Mr. Obama is as much to blame for the partisan pileup as Mr. Cruz. This is a President who is eager to negotiate with dubiously elected Iranian mullahs but can't abide compromise with duly elected leaders of Congress. He refuses to negotiate at all over an increase in the federal debt limit, claiming this has never happened. Like so much that Mr. Obama says, he knows this is false. His own staff suggested the spending sequester during the 2011 debt debate, and Democratic Congresses have used the debt limit to extract concessions from Republican Presidents. [emphasis added]

And then there's this, continuing on the theme of things the Obama people are saying that simply aren't true:

Once again tonight I heard Secretary of State John Kerry claiming on 60 Minutes that Iraq under Saddam Hussein didn't have chemical weapons — that the intelligence that he did was wrong — despite the fact that even John Kerry and others in the Obama regime have acknowledged that Saddam Hussein used those (nonexistent) weapons against Iran and against Iraq's own people in 1987-8.

Are Barack Obama, John Kerry, and their regime friends really that stupid — or do they think we are?

UPDATE:
Headline: Harry Reid Forced Obama To Scrap Meeting With GOP Leaders On Averting Government Shutdown…
Story:When the president considered sitting down with the four congressional leaders in the White House ahead of the deadline to avert a government shutdown, Reid privately urged Obama to call off the meeting, according to several people familiar with the situation. Reid believed that it would amount to nothing more than a photo-op that would give the false impression that a serious negotiation was occurring, even warning he wouldn’t attend such a session. Obama scrapped it. [emphasis added]
Result: Barack Obama and Harry Reid confirm again they are not willing to negotiate. They do not want an agreement. They want a shutdown. Their concept is "Let's compromise — do it my way!" They're just two little dictators.