The Obama Palace Guard is waging a losing battle to suppress the truth in a new ad from Americans for Prosperity, which explains how more than $2 billion in “stimulus” money went to foreign companies.
The “Wasteful Spending” ad, airing in 8 states with a media buy of $6.1 million, has also drawn criticism from the self-styled arbiters of political truth at the Washington Post.
You can imagine why: Obama promised the “stimulus” would “create or save” millions of American jobs, but with election day now less than six months away and millions more Americans jobless than before Obama took office, an ad questioning why Obama sent tax dollars to foreign companies really undermines the campaign's efforts to distract people.
Watch the video below to see for yourself:
Thankfully for him, the Washington Post stepped forward to protect the Obama legacy, pretending to “fact-check” the ad, but instead of refuting the facts in the ad, the WaPo served up a pro-Obama puff piece.
Then the Obama campaign produced their own response, drawing largely on the debunked WaPo article, with a video from Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter posted on Attack Watch that attacks the ad without challenging its central point – that Obama's stimulus program sent money to foreign companies. Her video is getting the response it deserves, and the WaPo is getting justly criticized for carrying Obama's water on this issue.
In desparation, Obama's chief campaigner David Axelrod is trying to make the story go away entirely by calling Americans for Prosperity and AFP members “contract killers.”
But the real killers in this episode are the truth-killers of the liberal media and the Obama campaign.
Obama's stimulus program in fact did send more than $2 billion to foreign companies. While the Washington Post hid its Obama campaign flackery behind the “fact-checking” label, the WaPo neither fact-checked the ad nor debunked it.
They can't, because it is true.
The “fact-checking” label they slapped onto their article was itself a lie, but these days the liberal media uses the “fact-check” label as a fig leaf to cover its partisan biases and mislead readers and viewers into thinking they are getting an unbiased, factual investigation of the truthfulness of political ads.
The Weekly Standard's online editor, Mark Hemingway, deconstructed the media's fascination with "fact-checking" last December and found it is driven largely by the same liberal point-of-view that infects much of the mainstream media. Wrote Hemingway:
They call themselves “fact checkers,” and with the name comes a veneer of objectivity doubling as a license to go after any remark by a public figure they find disagreeable for any reason.
Media fact checking endeavors have never been more popular and influential than they are now, largely thanks to the success of the St. Petersburg Times feature called “PolitiFact.” Launched in 2007, PolitiFact purports to judge the factual accuracy of statements from politicians and other prominent national figures.
The feature quickly gained popularity, and in 2009 the St. Petersburg Times won a Pulitzer Prize for PolitiFact, endowing the innovation with a great deal of credibility. “According to the Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact . . . ” has now become a kind of Beltway Tourette syndrome, a phrase sputtered by journalists and politicians alike in an attempt to buttress their arguments.
If the stated goal seems simple enough — providing an impartial referee to help readers sort out acrimonious and hyperbolic political disputes — in practice PolitiFact does nothing of the sort.
Instead, writes Hemingway, whether it is PolitiFact or other media outlets' “fact-check” features, they are proving themselves to be not impartial referees at all.
And like all products of journalism, the verdicts of the "fact-checkers" must be fact-checked, too.
