So what is new about this jive turkey? Barack Pinocchio Obama

Obama and his team have been playing the media for fools. Only Because They are!

Barack Pinocchio Obama | The Weekly Standard

Facts are Stubborn Things

Fred Barnes June 11, 2012

Are the media beginning to catch on to President Obama? The answer is a tentative yes. This doesn’t mean the press is softening its hostility to Mitt Romney. Heaven forbid! But at least for now Obama is getting razzed by the very people who used to uphold and defend him.

It’s about time. Obama and his team have been playing the media for fools. Think of the stories the White House has foisted on them (and some have bought). Obama secretly favors the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction plan. The Republican landslide in 2010 was consistent with Obama’s election in 2008—both pleas for change. His endorsement of same-sex marriage was courageous. And besides “gutsy call,” there was “nobody messes with Joe.” 

A turnaround was perceptible last month after the president claimed “federal spending since I took office has risen at the slowest pace of any president in almost 60 years.” This went too far. It clashed with the reality of a presidency in which hefty spending increases and soaring deficits are hallmarks.

Media fact checkers waded in, not from the right but from the Washington Post and the Associated Press. “Obama claim of thrifty spending falls short of reality,” AP concluded. Glenn Kessler of the Post said the president’s data “are flawed.” It was a full debunking, but Obama aides didn’t give up. They continued to argue Obama had slowed spending.

That’s another mark of the Obama presidency with potential for media attention: repeating a claim after it’s been exposed as false, misleading, or flimflam. Obama did this early in his presidency when he zapped House Republicans for rejecting his request to work with him on the economic stimulus. In truth, the stimulus bill was already a done deal—crafted entirely by Democrats—when the president spoke to the House GOP conference.

The practice popped up this spring in the Obama reelection video. The narrator, Tom Hanks, raises the story of Obama’s mother and suggests her health insurer curtailed her medical coverage as she was battling her terminal cancer. It “drained all her resources,” Obama adds in the video. But according to a biography of his mother published in May 2011, only disability coverage to compensate for lost wages was in dispute, not medical coverage.

Obama also plays fast and loose with numbers, a blinking target for the press. He said in Dearborn, Michigan, in April that the “most sluggish job growth that we’ve seen” occurred during the Bush presidency, “2000 to 2008.” The Washington Post’s fact checker, however, found that the “worst numbers on record occurred under [Obama’s] watch.” Nonetheless, Obama repeated the claim about Bush a few days later.

-more of his lies at link-