Let's clear up a few lies about our President shall we?

Jonathon Alter from the Washington Post has taken it upon himself to clear up five persistent myths about President Obama:  

1. President Obama is a Socialist.

Conservatives have echoed the charge throughout Obama’s presidency. Writing in Commentary magazine in 2010, Jonah Goldberg accused him of aiming to “nationalize” two auto companies, stage a “partial government takeover” of health care and seize “managerial control” of Wall Street. 

But none of this is true. By temporarily putting major banks under government control, the TARP bailout contained socialist elements — but that didn’t make Obama any more of a socialist than then-President George W. Bush and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who launched the rescue. Obama rejected nationalizing banks and made it clear that he had no interest in running the auto companies receiving TARP money. 

The president’s health-care overhaul keeps health insurance in private hands, adopts the “individual mandate” concept from the conservative Heritage Foundation, and is modeled in part on former governor Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts reform — not exactly a “Bolshevik plot,” as Obama put it. 

2. Obama is a tool of Wall Street. 

It’s true that the president bailed out banks and let their executives resume making millions without using the leverage he had in early 2009 to restructure financial institutions and hold them accountable for wrecking the economy. He also hired Clinton-era retreads such as Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, despite their roles in the 1990s deregulatory policiesthat helped create the crisis. 

However, there’s no evidence that the president did these things because he was beholden to Wall Street. Obama genuinely believed that closing banks would worsen the crisis and cost as much as $1 trillion in further bailouts. Time has proved Geithner’s “stress tests” to be smart policy; they stabilized banks and allowed almost all of the TARP money to be repaid. In the meantime, Obama fought for a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, pushed the “Buffett rule” to prevent fund managers and other top earners from paying lower tax rates than ordinary Americans, and backed a 5 percent tax surcharge on millionaires. 


3. Obama is an effective public speaker. Obama’s lofty speeches during the 2008 campaign led even his detractors to admit that he is a gifted orator. Some right-wing critics try to minimize his skill by saying he relies excessively on a teleprompter — a ridiculous charge considering that he often writes big chunks of his speeches and often speaks off-the-cuff. 

That said, there are few examples of Obama’s speeches actually moving popular opinion. That’s because he speaks in impressive paragraphs, not memorable sentences. He is allergic to sound bites, and that keeps him from effectively framing his goals and achievements. 

4. Obama’s stimulus package failed. 

This has become a GOP talking point, repeated by everyone from John Boehner to Karl Rove to Romney. It isn’t true. 

Objecting to various provisions of the stimulus or believing that it worsened the deficit isn’t the same as deeming it a failure. When the Obama administration was little more than a year old, three of the best-known economic research firms — IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy — all said the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which almost every Republican in Congress opposed, would create more than 2.5 million jobs. And last August, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the stimulus package created between 1.4 and 4 million jobs. Even Mark Zandi, one of McCain’s top economic advisers in 2008, has called the stimulus “a significant benefit to the economy’s performance.” 

5. Obama is a weak leader. 

Huh? Whatever one thinks of the Affordable Care Act, it hardly reflects a lack of leadership. (That’s like saying the Iraq war shows that Bush wasn’t a leader.) Leading in the wrong direction shouldn’t be confused with not leading. In truth, Obama has often been a bold, risk-taking president, rolling the dice on health care and launching the attack on Osama bin Laden’s compound, in both cases over the objections of some advisers. He didn’t back Simpson-Bowles — for political reasons — but neither did Romney or other Republicans who reject the commission’s recommended tax increases. Are they weak leaders, too?

There is more depth on this article if you want to click the link at the top. But I think you get the gist.

There are of course more ridiculous charges, including that he is a secret Muslim, that he was not born in this country, and that he did not write his own books, but I assume that Alter felt those were simply too crazy to address.

And I have to agree with that assessment.

Of course some of these lies are the very ones that Sarah Palin, with her phantom journalist degree, is frustrated that the MSM will not investigate.