MFM Keeps Lying For Obama

Here's CNN's headline:

Stimulus created nearly 683,000 jobs in first quarter

Created. Got that?

Here's the first line of the article:

The White House's $787 billion stimulus plan funded 682,779 jobs in the first quarter, administration officials said Friday.

Funded. Very different from "created."

Remember, the White House first wanted to change the criteria by which it would be judged from "created" -- the guage of every previous president -- to "created or saved," the latter being impossible to calculate and furthermore, being a wholly novel metric concocted only to benefit Obama, has no historical record against which to judge it. That is to say, even if we accept this metric as valid, how do we know if Obama is "saving or creating" more jobs than average, since we've never before measured this? Maybe Bush "saved or created" a lot more jobs.

At some point the White House decided that this made-up statistic was still too tough for Obama, so they changed their definition to "saved, or created, or funded." Merely funded. That is, if a dollar of federal money goes into paying/subsidizing a salary, that job counts as "saved or created or funded," as it was funded, after all. Whether or not it was saved or not is anyone's guess, but it was indeed funded.

It's also perfectly irrelevant. We care about the number of jobs in America, not whether the government is putting a little money to subsidize this one or that.

At any rate, Obama has now changed the standard by which he will be judged into something absolutely meaningless.

But look what CNN does here. Rather than headline the article with the meaningless "Obama Funds 682,779 jobs," they decide to amp up his accomplishment to Obama creates 682,779 jobs.

"Creating" jobs is the exact metric Obama has been running away from, because it so disfavors him. He has now reduced his burden twice, first to merely "saving" jobs, and then to even-more-merely "funding" them.

But CNN nevertheless gives him full credit in the headline for achieving the very Obama insists it would be unfair to measure him by.

Pretty cool, huh? First CNN rolls over and decides that sure, Obama is so special -- and apparently deserving of special treatment -- that he will be held to a meaningless standard for which there is no historical benchmark, thus ensuring his "success." Or, at least, no proof of his failure, as we simply have no other numbers to compare.

And then, having acceded to him on that, they nevertheless turn around and credit him for having met a real and verifiable goal which Obama himself refuses to be judged by.

posted by Ace at 05:35 PM

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