Here’s the latest attack ad from the Rick Perry campaign:
“Can you believe that?” Governor Perry incredulously asks. “That’s what our president thinks is wrong with America… that Americans are lazy?” Hmmm. I wonder where Perry might have gotten his inspiration for this grotesque distortion from? Oh, right, of course… GOP TV (aka Fox “News”):
It’s absolutely pathetic that President Obama cannot make a legitimate, factually accurate observation about genuine shortcomings in his country’s business development and foreign investment policies over the past two decades without being viciously and dishonestly attacked for doing so.
Lies (and the Lying Liars who Tell Them) Update: How refreshing to see a pundit call a spade a spade; i.e., that Rick Perry and Mitt Romney are deliberate LIARS.
Lawrence O’Donnell clarifies what Obama was actually saying before his words were taken out of context:
He`s saying our government has been a little bit lazy about that over the last couple of decades. It`s actually a very Republican-sounding idea that government is, to some extent, standing in the way of new business coming in to this country and that government has to make the business climate in this country more welcoming to business. It`s a classic Republican pro-business statement with a little insult to government thrown in there.
Is there a Republican out there who doesn`t think that the government, the government, is a little bit lazy? Is there a Republican out there who doesn’t think that every single government worker is a little bit lazy? Is there anything in that statement a Republican would disagree with? Of course not.
But if you just cut out a few words in the middle of it and show that to people, just like I just did with Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, then you have got yourself the makings of a Republican campaign ad. And yes, the campaign ad is based on a purposeful, and absolutely pure lie. And Republicans now want to make it the big lie of this campaign, the big Orwellian lie that President Obama thinks that Americans are lazy.
There are plenty of issues on which Republicans can legitimately disagree with Obama on… that they feel the desperate need to LIE perhaps says more about their own lack of integrity and intellectual feebleness than it does about anything else.
Red Tory v.3.0.3 
I agree with Obama on this, its just too bad he was lazy by putting off the Keystone pipeline decision.
I don’t think you can attribute the decision to postpone a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline to laziness. Political calculation, more like it.
What I don’t get about that project is why the oil cannot be refined at the source in Canada and then exported. Not only would it be cheaper to pipe the refined product, but it would also eliminate many (though not all) of the objections to its transmission.
While Obama may be correct in his assessment, it should have stayed between him and his advisors. His comments were not particularly helpful in leading a country back from the edge; hard working middle-class and once middle-class but no longer middle-class Americans hardly need to know that collectively they’ve not been hungry enough. He effectively moved from “we can do anything” — which was his franchise — to “let’s talk about why we haven’t”. Excuse making. And frankly, he should be smart enough to know how comments like that would be used against him, and how they would be interpreted, beyond what was precisely said. What did he exactly expect, everyone to nod approvingly at his assessment that they’ve been lazy?
As for Keystone XL, do we really have any control over the resource, which has cost a lot of money to extract, if we don’t own the end of the pipe?