President Obama’s ‘ISIS Lie’ Was The Biggest Of 2014, Claims Glenn Kessler

With 2014 rapidly drawing to a close, the usual annual “top ten” lists are making their way around the internet, rating people, fashion, the best songs and movies of the year, and just about everything in between.

To kick off the 2014 list, when Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler was asked, live on MSNBC’s Morning Joe by Joe Scarborough, to pick the biggest single lie of the year, he said that President Obama’s “ISIS lie” had to take the biscuit for the lie with the “biggest bang.”

In explaining his annual list of lies and liars, Kessler told his host, “Well, I look at the issues that, you know, resonate with people and are, or big issues. So, with one of the major things was Barack Obama saying that he was not specifically referring to ISIS when he was referred to a JV team.”

Kessler then went on to give Barack Obama a very high four Pinocchios for then trying to spin his ISIS statement, at a later date, “I got a hold of the actual transcript where he was interviewed with The New Yorker and it was pretty clear what he was talking about.”

Back in January, Obama gave a feature-length interview to David Remnick from the New Yorker, where he told Remnick, among other things, that Al-Qaeda and ISIS were comparable to junior varsity basketball players, downplaying their threat as small-league.

While Obama spoke back in 2012 about how Al Qaeda and ISIS had been “decimated,” those militants have overtaken massive swathes of territory across Syria and Iraq, with the flag of Al Qaeda now flying in Falluja.

Back then, President Obama said, “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” then employing a curious flip analogy, saying, “I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.”

Although his analogy subsequently turned out to be false, it is fair to say that President Obama was not alone in underestimating what ISIS would become by 2014.