So I woke up today to this tale, courtesy of the Republican Party:
The coffee was still brewing when Chris Ann Cleland got her first reminder of the day that voting for Barack Obama might have been a mistake.
The Prince William County real estate agent was sitting at a long wooden table covered with paperwork. Her clients, a young couple who had brought their 2-week-old baby, were finalizing a short sale on a townhouse that they were anxious to unload, even if it meant ruining their credit, because they had maxed out their credit cards trying to make the payments.
For Cleland, it was another example -- one of many this day -- of the broken promises of a president who she thought would be different.
But wait -- this didn't come from the GOP, it was published by the Washington Post. Which conservative columnist authored it, you ask? None of them! It was a front page news story. What the hell?
The story continues on in this vein. It assumes that Obama's policies -- or, as the Post calls them, his controversial domestic agenda" -- are to blame for the poor state of the economy, as if this was some incontrovertible fact that required no substantiation.
Look, clearly there are people who have turned against Obama. But their opinion that he has failed the country or broken his promises is just that -- an opinion, not a fact. I'm not quite sure how this managed to get into a news article.
--Jonathan Chait