The Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler takes a look at some of the claims President Obama made about the bailouts of the automobile industry. His takeaway? “What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech. Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.”

It’s interesting that Kessler is just addressing the facts here, not the higher-level issue of whether a bailout can ever be a success in the way Obama wants to portray the auto bailouts. Yet merely on the narrow question of the facts, Obama is badly wrong — and he knows it, as evidenced by the careful wording of his distortions.