The pathological party

For the past couple of days, FOX News and Lou Dobbs have been bleating nonstop about President Obama's 'broken' campaign promise to ban all earmarks.

Only one problem -- he never made any such promise. That was John McCain, as Keith Olbermann pointed out last night on Wednesday..

As you'll see in this video, during the campaign President Obama actually said that while he supported earmark reform, he believed a line-by-line review would show that some earmarks were for good programs and some were for bad programs.

In fact, President Obama criticized John McCain's single-minded obsession with earmarks, pointing out that banning all earmarks wouldn't come close to balancing the budget, nor would it fix the economy.

But never mind the truth, the winger media has gone out and invented a claim Obama never made, and now they are accusing him of breaking it.

Watch for yourself:

Here's a transcript of the quotes in this video from then-candidate Obama:

Second debate:

Senator McCain likes to talk about earmarks a lot. And that's important. I want to go line by line through every item in the federal budget and eliminate programs that don't work and make sure that those that do work, work better and cheaper.

First debate:

And, absolutely, we need earmark reform. And when I'm president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely. But the fact is that eliminating earmarks alone is not a recipe for how we're going to get the middle class back on track.

Second debate:

I mean, Senator McCain has been talking tough about earmarks, and that's good, but earmarks account for about $18 billion of our budget.

Third debate:

Now, Senator McCain talks a lot about earmarks. That's one of the centerpieces of his campaign. Earmarks account for 0.5 percent of the total federal budget. There's no doubt that the system needs reform and there are a lot of screwy things that we end up spending money on, and they need to be eliminated. But it's not going to solve the problem.

First debate:

But let's be clear: Earmarks account for $18 billion in last year's budget. Senator McCain is proposing -- and this is a fundamental difference between us -- $300 billion in tax cuts to some of the wealthiest corporations and individuals in the country, $300 billion. Now, $18 billion is important; $300 billion is really important.