Now we are bailing out Germany too!

Over the years, and particularly during the Bush years, media sources liked to "fact check" presidential speeches. Obama's speech on Tuesday wasn't different very much. It was striking to me that the N.T. Times and the Washington Post, two newspapers who would have tore Bush a new one for making a stupid statement didn't seem to care about fact checking the President's speech. Of course, the Washington Post is the same newspaper that admitted, after the election, that their coverage was biased in favor of Obama. At any rate, the Associated Press issued an article doing the fact checking piece on the speech, as they usually do. I saw it picked up in a couple of places. It wasn't too bad for his first speech before Congress actually. He only misrepresented the amount of oil imported today and who will actually get money under his housing aid plan. Those are typical political ploys made by most politicians, so I'll ignore those. However, one of his statements would have been front page news had Bush or maybe even Clinton (media sources seem to have more integrity back when Clinton was President than they do now, in my opinion) said it. I don't really care that much that our President doesn't know who invented the automobile. I suspect if you took a national poll, an overwhelming majority of Americans would also think it was us. However, isn't he supposed to have speech writers and fact checkers to make sure this kind of stuff doesn't happen? Yep, of course, so has all the other Presidents and it still happens. Perhaps that is really a commentary on speech writers? At any rate, in the speech, Obama says: "And I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it." Cool for the American auto industry, right? After all, he's basically just announced that he's planning on giving them a lot more money. That's what is really meant by the statement. Anyone who reads this blog knows how I feel about bailouts, so I won't go into that here, but I have to say I do find this statement by our President to be quite amusing. After all, we all know he means the American auto industry must be bailed out. However, that isn't what he said. How can that be you ask? Well, since the automobile was invented in Germany by Benz, not in the U.S. by Ford (he wasn't even the first in the U.S.), I guess I'd have to say that our President just offered to bail out the German auto industry. That's what he said even if it wasn't what he meant. I know, I know, I'm splitting semantic hairs and being nasty to the President, eh? Well, actually that wasn't the point of this article at all. While I find the statement funny, I would not have caught it myself. I find it refreshing, a bit, that the Associated Press did catch it. However, the point of this article is to point out the double standard the media seems to be so fond of displaying with this President. As I said, they would have railed Bush, Clinton, anyone who made this type of faux pas in the past, so why did Obama largely get a pass? Anyone got an answer for that, beyond the obvious?