Q: How do you know when a politician is lying?

A: His lips are moving.

As one might expect, Obama’s speech at the University of Michigan this past weekend contained a healthy portion of misstatements, debatable half-truths, and deep-thick bullshit. If political rhetoric were to pollute our drinking water, we’d be perpetually living in a state of panic, as many here in the Boston area felt the same weekend. But as Christ himself said, it’s not what goes into a person that defiles him, it’s what comes out.

I’m not going through the entire speech, but I’d like to focus on one little gem that was picked up by the AP and rebroadcast far and wide:

What troubles me is when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad… When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us.

This snippet contains two huge, obvious fallacies. Can you spot them? If not, don’t worry; I intend to point them out.