Post’s Fact Checker indulges Obama on Keystone comments

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You’d think it would be fairly easy for Washington Post fact check columnist Glenn Kessler to render a judgment on a politician’s claims when they involve numbers that can be checked. Yet somehow Kessler’s Sunday column manages to find ambiguity in a recent jobs number claim by President Obama.

The column focuses on comments Obama made to the New York Times on July 24 about the estimated number of jobs the Keystone XL pipeline project would create. As Kessler notes, the number he cites is directly contracted by the State Department’s own March estimate. Yet he grades Obama’s comments as if they were a half-truth, giving it “two Pinocchios.”

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