LA Times has a story that makes the seasoned observer wonder if the White House isn’t throwing the Chicago Olympic Committee under the bus.

“The intelligence that we had from the U.S. Olympic Committee and Chicago bid team was that it was very close and therefore well worth our efforts,” said Valerie Jarrett, a senior White House advisor. “The message was that . . . a personal appeal from the president would make a huge difference.”

At first, Obama was to do some “quiet lobbying.”

Working from the White House, he placed calls to half a dozen influential people, including IOC President Jacques Rogge. It quickly became clear that other heads of state were doing the same thing — especially the president of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

“It was apparent when he made those calls that Lula had been there [made calls?] earlier,” senior White House aide David Axelrod said.

Jarrett, “a strong proponent of the drive to deliver the Games,” urged that Obama make the trip.  So did Daley, of course.  Obama wanted to go, but had to be sure Health Care would not be on the Senate floor.  Chicago kept pushing.

Daley and Patrick Ryan, chairman of Chicago 2016, were among those who told the White House that the nose count showed a presidential visit might close the sale, Jarrett said.

She excuses them:

“It’s a secret ballot. You can’t necessarily be certain that the people who tell you they’ll vote for you ultimately will,” Jarrett said. “So I’m sure they did the very best they could do to get the intelligence they had.”

So.  It’s done this way, subtly, indirectly.  You can’t blame them for being wrong, dead wrong about sending the President across the waters.  And you certainly can blame him or his supposed wise advisors.

There’s the nil nisi bonum rule for the just-deceased — say “nothing but good” about them (de mortuis).  This is the rule mainstreamers, or now you see “legacy media,” follow about Obama. 

The spin is constant, indeed dizzying, as described in the matter of job losses in a recession by James Taranto, whose “Best of the Web Today” feature has been gracing the Wall Street Journal site for many years.

Taranto quotes a free-market think tank which has studied and compared network TV coverage of bad times under Reagan with coverage under Obama.

The Business & Media Institute analyzed network unemployment stories [when] data was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics between March 2009 to September 2009 and March 1982 to September 1982.

The networks

“were 13 times more negative in their treatment of Reagan than Obama.” Twenty of 22 stories mentioning the Reagan administration portrayed it negatively, versus 1 out of 15 that mentioned the Obama administration.

The perpetrator most familiar to today’s viewers was ABC’s Charles Gibson, then a Capitol Hill correspondent, who found nothing good in the 1982 report.  “All the numbers are bad,” he said and quoted Dem critics including Wisconsin Congressman Henry Reuss, who characterized Reagan’s policies as not “just mistaken,” but “wicked.”

By 2009, anchorman Gibson had developed a sunny outlook, announcing for his ABC audience that “sometimes a bad jobs report can look good.”  Reporting that 345,000 lost their jobs, he found hope.

“[T]he number was smaller than economists had predicted, and that’s good news,” he pronounced, even if the 9.4 percent unemployment rate was “pretty bad.” He made no mention of Obama at all.  A few months later, in August, he thought the economy “may be finally turning the corner.”

It’s “Candide” revisited.

Liars figure, figures . . . do what?

Tell us the grim truth about (a) the economy, (b) the stimulus/recovery plan, and (c) White House truthiness.

(From Instapundit, who got it from Don Surber.)