Rick Perry came out with a terrifyingly scary “shock and awe” style campaign video earlier today that casts President Obama as some fascist ruler who led us into nuclear apocalypse with the motto of hope. In a previous post, jay mentioned that the frightening audio track is actually the theme music from the SAW films. Now despite how much I wish this was a trailer for a new post-apocalyptic Children of Men or Waterworld type film, it’s very, very, very factually deceptive.

The most misleading part about the video is how the Perry Campaign asserts that Obama is to blame for the latest U.S. Census Bureau statistics about poverty in America that put the national poverty rate at 15.1 percent for 2010.

 

 

As the following timeline illustrates, the number of people in poverty has been steadily rising since the 2001 recession during George W. Bush’s first term in office, and that number increased considerably at the onset of the 2008 recession.

 

 

It would be difficult to argue that Obama’ economic policies capitulated us to this hellish, empty Hallmark store aisle pictured in Perry’s campaign ad.

 

 

Moreover, for Rick Perry to argue that his “proven leadership” will get us out of this mess is simply false, since Texas’s poverty rate of 18.4 percent is higher than the national average by 3.3 percent. If you want to go by Perry’s rounding-up of the national rate to make it seem like “one-in-six” Americans are living below the poverty line, then the amount of Texans living in poverty would be one-in-five.

I suggest that if the media and the Obama campaign want to seize onto the actual substance that lingers after this frightening phantasmagoria plays out, it shouldn’t be too difficult to prove how factually deceptive this campaign video is.