Obama's Latest Oops Moment

In the last few months, we have seen Rick Perry lambasted when he momentarily forgot the third federal department that he would close were he to be elected president. We have also seem Michelle Bachmann called an idiot for saying that Concord and Lexington were in New Hampshire. Similar type charges or stupidity were often thrown at Herman Cain while he was in the race when he seemed unaware of some facts about foreign countries. On the other hand, president Obama is always described in the press as the smartest person in the room. Obama can talk about visiting all 57 states and it barely gets a mention. He can mispronounce "corps" repeatedly and the press looks the other way. These, we are told, are just momentary lapses by the supersmart Obama while the other instances listed above are indications that the Republican candidates are idiots. Well today, Obama had a few moments in Kansas that were anything but momentary lapses.

First, Obama started out by saying how it was great to be back in Texas. Obama caught himself and corrected the mistake, but this is just the kind of thing that would drive the press into a frenzy if it came out of the mouth of Bachmann or Perry.

Then came the big one. Obama in his speech blamed many of the job losses in this country since the start of the recession on computers and the internet. Specifically, Obama pointed to bank tellers, phone operators and travel agents as workers whose jobs have been wiped away by the internet. This was no mistake; Obama read it right off the teleprompter. Indeed, last June Obama had told the world that the internet and ATM machines had destroyed the jobs of bank tellers. So clearly, Obama accepts this as a fact.

The problem, however, is that it is not even close to being true. figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show that bank teller jobs increased from 453,150 to 556,320 between 1999 and 2010. That's right, at a point when Obama says that ATM's and computers were destroying jobs, the actual number of jobs in this field went up by 20 percent. Indeed, when Obama first came out with this whopper last June, there was a lot of buzz correcting his mistake. So the White House was fully aware of the mistake. But did that stop him from doing it again? Of course not. I sometimes think that if someone mistakenly put a recipe on the teleprompter, Obama would read that to a joint session of Congress without batting an eye. He doesn't pay attention to what he is saying.

And let's add in Obama's statement from the other day that when the payroll tax cut bills were put forward in the Senate, not a single Republican voted for them. That statement may fit Obama's storyline that the Republicans are obstructionists trying to protect the wealthy, but it is just not true. Twenty two Republican senators voted for the payroll tax cut extension; that is just less than half of all Republicans. Surely, Obama knew the truth. That leaves us with the choice that he is either an idiot or a liar. It is not a good choice to have to make when the person in question is the president of the United States.