By now, I’m sure most of you have heard the horror story about the apples-and-oranges comparisons between Bush’s inauguration costs and Obama’s. If not, here’s the story at Media Matters.
Here’s why using the $160 million number and comparing it with Bush’s 2005 costs represented a classic apples-and-oranges assessment: For years, the press routinely referred to the cost of presidential inaugurations by calculating how much money was spent on the swearing-in and the social activities surrounding that. The cost of the inauguration’s security was virtually never factored into the final tab, as reported by the press. For instance, here’s The Washington Post from January 20, 2005, addressing the Bush bash:
The $40 million does not include the cost of a web of security, including everything from 7,000 troops to volunteer police officers from far away, to some of the most sophisticated detection and protection equipment.
For decades, that represented the norm in terms of calculating inauguration costs: Federal dollars spent on security were not part of the commonly referred-to cost. (The cost of Obama’s inauguration, minus the security costs? Approximately $45 million.) What’s happening this year: The cost of the Obama inauguration and the cost of the security are being combined by some in order to come up with the much larger tab. Then, that number is being compared with the cost of the Bush inauguration in 2005, minus the money spent on security.
This calculation showed up not just on Fox, but on MSNBC, because all these fuckers are in the habit of repeating slander they see on the Drudge Report as if it were news. I don’t think that the people at MSNBC were being willful in this, but I have exactly zero doubt that the right wing sources who started this story knew that’s it’s intellectually dishonest to remove the costs of security from Bush’s figure and include it in Obama’s. And they didn’t care. This is going to be a major issue for the next 4-8 years. Right wingers will just blatantly lie about Obama, Drudge will post links, and the morons in the mainstream media will repeat the lies without doing basic fact-checking. Which will be left to Media Matters. Great.