Too much of the mainstream media continues its feeble attempts to prop up President Obama’s class-warfare rhetoric with its ostensible “fact-checking.”

Politifraud, which has too often been at the forefront of this effort, weighs in with this beauty, rating Obama’s claim that:

"A construction worker who’s making $50 or $60 grand a year shouldn’t be paying higher tax rates than the guy who’s making $50 million a year. And that’s how it’s working right now."

Really? Is that true? According to Politifraud, it’s “half-true.”

The bottom line is that taxpayers in Obama’s construction-worker income range tended to pay an effective federal income tax rate of 7 percent to 8 percent.

…

Clearly, then, the $10 million plus crowd is paying a higher average tax rate than the $50,000 to $75,000 crowd. But remember that Obama said $50 million, not $10 million. Does the math change for those who are even richer?

The best data we could find addresses the 400 highest-income taxpayers in the nation. In 2008, the cutoff to make it into this rarefied group was an income of $109.7 million — which is above Obama’s $50 million threshold. These taxpayers had an average federal income tax rate of 18.1 percent, which is also higher than the rate paid by the $50,000 to $75,000 crowd.

Funny, that sure reads like a “false” and maybe even a “pants on fire.” How does this get bumped up to “half-true?”

But that’s not the end of the story. These figures are for federal income taxes only. There are also a bunch of other federal taxes that could, and probably should, be included in the calculation. The burden for some some [sic] taxes, including corporate taxes, excise taxes and estate taxes, are hard to attribute to individual returns, so we’ll set those aside. But one federal tax is straightforward to throw into our calculations: payroll taxes.

Like magic, Politifraud sets aside all of the additional taxes that would make Obama’s lie even more obvious and will only concern itself with the one that can bump the lower-income tax rate closer to the upper-income one.

Why?

Because it’s hard.

And they’re lazy.

And dishonest.

Jonathan Karl over at ABC News is at least a little more honest:

The key numbers:  this year those earning over $1 million will pay, on average, 29.1 percent on federal taxes.  Those earning between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay 15 percent.

…

The numbers change a bit if you look at total income before deductions and tax credits (Adjusted Gross Income), according to another non-partisan group, The Tax Foundation. Here’s how the numbers breakdown using IRS data from 2009 on Adjusted Gross Income for the income groups at issue in this discussion:

-           $10 million a year paid 22 percent.

-          $1 million  to $10 million paid 25 percent.

-          $50,000 to $75,000 paid 7 percent.

The rate for the middle-income filers drop because many individual deductions and tax credits are phased out for higher income taxpayers.

Beware of journalists doing math.

We’re about 2/3 of the way through President Obama’s first term and who’s to blame for this mess? According to former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, it’s George W. Bush’s fault.

The decline in Obama’s political fortunes, the Great Disappointment, can be attributed to four main factors: the intractable legacy bequeathed by George W. Bush; Republican resistance amounting to sabotage; the unrealistic expectations and inevitable disenchantment of some of the president’s supporters; and, to be sure, the man himself.

Obama inherited a country in such distress that his Inaugural Address alluded to George Washington at Valley Forge, marking “this winter of our hardship.” Unfunded wars, supply-side deficits, twin housing and banking crises enabled by an orgy of regulatory permissiveness — that was the legacy Obama assumed. In our political culture if you inherit a problem and don’t fix it, you own it. So at some point it became the popular wisdom that Iraq and Afghanistan were “Obama’s wars,” and that the recession had become “Obama’s economy.” Given the systemic burden Bush left for his successor, that judgment seems to me to be less about fair play than about short memories. But this is what passes for accountability in our system. And the Republicans have been relentlessly effective at rebranding every failing of the Bush administration as Obama’s fault. The historical truth, therefore, is no longer a viable political shelter for the Obama presidency. At best we can hope it serves as a caution against those who preach a return to the indiscriminate tax cuts and regulatory free-for-all that helped produce our lingering mess in the first place.

Another toxic legacy of the Bush years is an angry conservative populism, in which government is viewed as tyranny and compromise as apostasy. The Tea Party faction has captured not only the Republican primary process, but to a large extent the national conversation and the legislative machinery. In Congress the anger is pandered to by Republicans who should know better, since their nihilism discredits not only the president they have cynically set out to make a failure, but their own institution. Voters are frustrated by this — Congress has the approval rating of bedbugs — but it remains to be seen whether the electorate will punish the real culprits or simply reward the candidates who run against that bogeyman, “Washington.”

Someone call a waaahmbulance! Does anyone think if things were going as swimmingly well as the Obama administration had predicted (i.e. the stimulus keeps the unemployment rate under 8 percent), that Keller and his ilk would be crediting the Bush-sponsored TARP as part of the reason and suggesting that maybe the recession wasn’t all that bad in the first place?

Speaking of responsibility, you know whose fault this is?

Obviously Bill Keller’s.