Over the past weeks, President Obama has been running around the country like Chicken Little spreading falsehoods about sequester, all in the hopes of blaming a 2% budget cut (which he proposed and signed into law) for an anemic economy that might be headed into a double-dip recession. Simply put, the White House and its media are pushing this fabricated Narrative in the hopes of shifting blame away from Obama’s failed economic policies and onto the GOP and a lack of government largess.

If our economy crashes, Obama wants to blame sequester; he wants to argue that our economic woes are caused by a government that isn’t big enough, and that he needs a Democrat-controlled House to correct that. It’s an audaciously dishonest plot, and it almost worked. The monkeys in the wrench, though, have been little things called facts, a Republican Party refusing to blink, and one brave and honest reporter.

Now the Narrative is starting to collapse, and nothing signals that collapse better than this National Journal piece published today that blows the lid off the media’s and the White House’s sequester lies:

The Overhyped, Overblown, & Overly Politicized Sequester Fears

It turns out that the next big fiscal crisis will seem more like a whimper when it hits on March 1.

Let’s be clear about one thing: The across-the-board spending cuts known as the “sequester” aren’t a doomsday scenario, or a meteorite that will blow up the economy.

Teachers, FBI agents, and Border Patrol officers will not get fired tomorrow, when the sequester kicks in. The Internal Revenue Service will still be able to process your tax return in April. Preschool programs won’t kick out 70,000 little kids until the fall, according to Education Secretary Arne Duncan–and that’s if the spending cuts stick. Unemployed people, arguably some of the worst-off of the lot, will not see their federal benefits reduced by 11 percent until April at the earliest, says the National Employment Law Project. This is roughly four weeks away, giving Congress and the White House time to act beyond the March 1 deadline that has been touted in headlines and press conferences for the past week.

The immediate impact of sequester is “absolutely overhyped,” says Steve Bell, senior director for economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center and a former Republican staff director for the Senate Budget Committee. “A sequester will occur and, the next day, the likelihood is that almost no one will know that it started.”

Along with other myths, the piece goes on to deconstruct the falsehoods about agencies not having flexibility to choose where these miniscule cuts hit.

Obama and his media based this Narrative on lies… The lie that sequester wasn’t his idea; the lie that tax increases were part of the sequester deal; the lie that government agencies had no control over where the cuts hit; the lie that a meager $85 billion cut in a trillion-dollar budget would mean the end of the world.

Obama has spent the last weeks gambling Republicans would cave and that his media would never dare challenge his fear-mongering with ridiculous nightmare scenarios. But drip by drip by drip, the mask was ripped off by a few honest reporters exposing lies that not even the ObamaMedia could spin away.

The President’s justified confidence in a media that long ago sold its soul on his behalf put him way out over his skis, and now, thanks to a few honest reporters, it’s all tumbling down around him.

 

Follow  John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC