SCOAMF Now Inventing Stories in the Aid of a Higher Truth [JWF]

When you don't have the facts on your side, just make things up. Now if someone told a lie about you, what would you do? Correct the story, right? Sure, most normal people would do that. But when you're a Koolaid-slurping Obama zombie, you just play along.

President Obama spun a work of creative nonfiction yesterday in his latest pitch for his jobs plan, fudging the facts of a Boston schoolteacher’s White House visit as he cast the man as a poster boy for the hot-button bill.

“I had a chance to meet a young man named Robert Baroz,” the president said at a midday news conference. “He’s got two decades of teaching experience. He’s got a master’s degree. He’s got an outstanding track record of helping his students make huge gains in reading and writing. In the last few years, he’s received three pink slips because of budget cuts. Why wouldn’t we want to pass a bill that puts somebody like Robert back in the classroom teaching our kids?”

Two problems: Obama never met Baroz. And Baroz remains happily employed.

Can't he find some other schlub he can use as a prop? All he needs to do is head to Lower Manhattan and find one of those schmucks protesting on his behalf.

But it actually gets more pathetic. This Baroz fellow says it's perfectly OK with him that Obama is indulging in fiction.

Baroz, who supports Obama and his efforts to restore the public sector, told the Herald yesterday he doesn’t mind if the president — or his speechwriters — took some liberties with the facts. It was all in aid of a higher truth, he said.

“People who want to fuss over the word choice are missing the point. It’s about our investing in education and in communities,” Baroz said. “It was technically correct; yes, I did lose my position three times within four years in the Boston Public Schools. To me, the question he posed to the people was a rhetorical question. The emphasis was on ‘like Robert.’ It’s people who are like me, highly qualified, and are not working. That’s the spirit of it.”

Could you imagine a Republican getting away this this crap? No, neither can I.

Curiously, the Boston Globe profiles this Baroz fellow, but makes no mention that Obama made up the story of meeting him.

Baroz is on the Department of Education payroll, for crying out loud, ironically as a literary facilitator. Maybe he could teach the SCOAMF how to speak without the support of visual aids.

Meanwhile, the AP is fact-checking the rest of the SCOAMF's speech, and it isn't pretty.

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posted by Guest Blogger at 11:55 AM

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