China Says Geithner's Book Proves U.S. Cannot Be Trusted

The Chinese official Xinhua News Agency published an incendiary article this morning titled: “Geithner Charges White House With Telling Him To Lie, But Fallout Muted.” Over the last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping is reported to have fired 183,000 Communist Party bureaucrats and purged dozens of senior officials suspected of corruption. 

In charging that Geithner’s book, Stress Test, proves the Obama Administration lies to the American people, China is saying the United States is so morally degenerate, their opinions should have no value regarding China’s dispute with Vietnam over the Paracel Island. 

In my earlier article “Tim Geithner Gives the World a Stress Test: Part One,” I said that the most unique element of former U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s book Stress Test is that “he seems to have actually written it.” But in telling his own story, Geithner does out the Obama Administration for conspiracy to lie to the American people on the Sunday morning talk shows about Social Security and the deficit. According to Geithner:

I remember during one Roosevelt Room prep session before I appeared on the Sunday shows, I objected when (White House official) Dan Pfeiffer wanted me to say Social Security didn’t contribute to the deficit. “It wasn’t a main driver of our future deficits, but it did contribute. Pfeiffer said the line was a ‘dog whistle’ to the left, a phrase I had never heard before. He had to explain that the phrase was code to the Democratic base, signaling that we intended to protect Social Security.

Although it is common for the U.S. press to insinuate politicians lie, Xinhua accusing the president of the United States of conspiring to lie is a first and could only have been sparked by the Chinese government’s desire to undercut U.S. moral authority.

In late April, President Obama declared that a group of islands, claimed by both Japan and China, were covered by America’s security treaty with Japan. In the Philippines, Obama inked a 10-year agreement to increase U.S. forces there. The trip was dubbed as the “China containment tour.” 

To retaliate against what they perceived as interference in their affairs, the Chinese military and state-controlled oil monopoly, CNOCC, on May 3^rd moved a deepwater drilling rig to a spot just 120 miles off the coast of Vietnam in an oil exploration block where Petro-Vietnam and ExxonMobil have discovered vast oil and gas reserves.

Rioting broke out across Vietnam last week as thousands of Vietnamese stormed Chinese- and Taiwanese-owned factories in protest of China beginning to drill for oil in Vietnam’s “exclusive territorial zone.” The Vietnamese government said just one person was killed, but a doctor at a hospital near one area of rioting said he had seen 21 dead bodies and that at least 100 people were wounded.

Xinhua quoted Christopher Galdieri, assistant professor at Saint Anselm College, as saying, “I don’t think anything Geithner says in his book, alone, will do much to galvanize Republicans. Instead it will be viewed by activists on the right as the latest in what they see as a long line of scandals, missteps, and misdeeds.” Galdieri noted that Republican activists would likely add Geithner’s accusations to the list of what they view as other scandals, including the attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans including a U.S. ambassador, and the National Security Agency’s massive domestic spy program.”

China perceives the Obama Administration’s action against Libya, Egypt, Syria, Ukraine, Russia, and now in the South China Sea as imperialistic efforts to undermine China’s emergence as a world power. Any opportunity to portray Obama as a liar and the United States as untrustworthy is now fair game. 

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