Hey big spender

Perhaps the greatest success of the GOP smear machine, and the best illustration of our failed media experiment, is the fully entrenched Obama is a big spender lie. As Nutting points out here, even the occasional Democrat buys into that one.

But it didn’t happen. Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.

After adjusting for inflation, spending under Obama is falling at a 1.4% annual pace — the first decline in real spending since the early 1970s, when Richard Nixon was retreating from the quagmire in Vietnam.

In per-capita terms, real spending will drop by nearly 5% from $11,450 per person in 2009 to $10,900 in 2013 (measured in 2009 dollars).

Yet you have every major GOPer from the Romneybot to McConnell to Boehner pounding the podium, wailing about "the prairie fire of spending" since Obama took office which our stenographic media dutifully reports verbatim without ever once mentioning it's the freaking lie of the century. Hell, we're lucky Politifact has never decided to check that one. After a diligent search, they're bound to find a misplaced comma somewhere in the analysis and declare it mostly true.

This is how GOPers keep getting elected and why they don't bother at all to hide their lies. Why would they? Not only do they pay no price, they get rewarded for it. [via]

[Thanks to Michael J.W. Stickings filling in at Mike's Blog Round Up for kindly linking in. And you're not reading him every day at The Reaction where once I co-blogged myself, you're missing out on some of the best analysis on the interwebs]

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]