Messin' with Joe

It wasn't a big thing, but did you notice how different Biden looked at the convention for his speech?  Here's a comparison with a photo from earlier in the summer...

Yesterday he was out giving a speech and encouraged people to 'fact-check' him.  The AP had already done so--repeated here by Fox News.  The biggest misdirection seems to be the contention the Obama folks have created 4.5 million private sector jobs.  Of course, that depends on how it's worded.  The Biden folks can say they aren't fibbing because ole Joe sandwiched it with "after the worst job loss since the Great Depression", then said "in the past 29 months", which is correct.  But not every Democratic operative uses that context.  The goal is to make it seem Obama has already created more jobs than all eight years of Bush. 

But that's the flim-flam.  When someone parses only the 'new' jobs created during Dubya's terms they get roasted.   For instance, here's Media Matters scolding Hannity for saying he created 10 million "new" jobs, more or less accurate if you subtract all the jobs lost towards the end.  The left is now saying Bush's average new job creation was only 20,000 a month--yes, using the bookend numbers.  As Hackity said, when the millions of jobs were being created after the tax cuts and 9/11 it was hundreds of thousands per month.  But it's not OK to parse that way with W, only with the O.  

The bigger Biden distortion was probably saying that Romney "believes it's OK to raise taxes on middle classes by $2,000."  That's solely based on some expert's interpretation of Romney's plan, not the Romney plan itself.  And forget the fact that the great keynote speaker Bill Clinton engineered the largest tax increase in history back in the early 90s, meaning he definitely thought it was OK to raise taxes on the middle class, and that if nothing is done those huge increases will come back in January 2013.  But hey, we're not supposed to mess with Joe.