There are plenty of reasons to be unhappy with the tenure of President Obama.  The most vocal people tend not to bring up any of those valid reasons.  What do they do instead?  They make crap up.  It doesn’t matter how stupid the stuff they make up is.  It doesn’t matter how easily disprovable the stuff they make up is.  All that matters is that the sizable portion that dislikes Obama will believe it.

Take Tuesday’s State of the Union address.  President Obama claimed that he will use a series of Executive Orders to get things accomplished in areas where Congress wasn’t moving fast enough and he was legally able to use Executive Orders.  This is unprecedented!  Obama is a dictator!  Obama is killing democracy!  Tyranny!  Didn’t Hitler also issue Executive Orders?!

Here’s the thing.  Executive Orders are public knowledge.  There are places that keep track of these things.  Guess what it shows.   Go on, guess!  Yep, Obama has issued fewer Executive Orders per year than any other President since records have been kept (back to Herbert Hoover).  The general trend is that the number of Executive Orders per President has been going down quite fast.  In fact, the lowest number of Executive Orders per year have been ordered by the last five Presidents.

So yes, Obama is well outside the norm when it comes to amount of Executive Orders issued by a President.  But he is well below average, not above.  And what should be a story about how much restraint the Obama Administration has shown when it comes to Executive Orders is twisted into a story about how, once again, Obama is un-American and destroying our country.  But don’t worry, race has nothing to do with this.