White House Wants it Both Ways

I saw David Axelrod on Fox yesterday and he was commenting on gas prices. He said "Gas prices are 11% higher than they were when Obama became President." First, this figure is completely wrong, but I will tell you how the White House is deceive the public.

If we look at crude prices when Obama came into office on January 20, 2009, the price was under $66/gallon. And today, they are at $107/gallon - a difference of 62%! So your first impression might be: "The guy in the White House is lying to us!"

Well, if we give the President the benefit of the doubt and say, hey, he's talking about the day he was actually elected, on November 4th, 2008, then we are closer. The price on that day was around $90/barrel, so today's prices are 18% higher.

Either way, the figure is wrong, but my problem is that the President is clearly attempting to deceive us and sometimes he uses the November 2008 date as a baseline for when he began, and sometimes he uses January 2009. Take unemployment for example, he usually says that when he started it was at 7.8% (January 2009 figure) and he never uses the figure which came out during the week of his election (6.5%).

Hey, I know most Presidents take credit for what they want, and blame the other guy for the bad stuff, but I think Obama takes this game to a completely new level, to a new stratosphere.