Obama "The Uniter" Calling Republicans Ignorant liars

Power Line takes on this claim and shows the ignorance is clearly Obama’s:

Two points: First, even if Obama’s “3 to 4 percent” claim about tire inflation were true, it would not validate his original assertion that proper inflation would equal “all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling.” That assertion was, and remains, false.

Second, Obama’s claim that “every expert” says that tire inflation would “reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4 percent” is ridiculous. No expert says any such thing. What experts do say is that properly inflated tires can improve gas mileage by approximately 3 percent compared to grossly underinflated tires. But since most people know this and inflate their tires, the actual potential savings is some much smaller amount. Moreover, the U.S. consumes around 20.7 million barrels of petroleum per day. Only about 9.3 million barrels per day are used in motor vehicles. So a 3 percent improvement in automobile mileage would correspond, at best, to a 1.3 percent reduction in total oil consumption.

Barack Obama’s ignorance on the subject of energy is remarkable.

And Dean’s World does the math:

Republicans are having some fun with a remark by Barack Obama:

“But we could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling — if everybody was just inflating their tires? And getting regular tune-ups? You’d actually save just as much!”

Which naturally leads to the RNC sending out tire gauges labelled “Obama’s Energy Plan.” Heh.

How silly is this statement? Doing the math, it looks like he’s off by about an order of magnitude. The DOE link says you can save 3.3% and U.S. consumption is 20.8M barrels a day, half of which is gasoline, so even if fully half the population is driving on very poorly inflated tires you’re talking about only about 165,000 barrels a day, a tenth or less of the millions of barrels a day we could add in production. Hell, the mean estimate for ANWR alone is 780,000 bpd.

Of course, Barack could easily defuse this by admitting he was wrong, but as with the surge he will not. This is why Barack Obama’s team is scared to death of any debate format that doesn’t rely on teleprompters: he’s a walking gaffe-o-matic and too arrogant to admit when he’s wrong — probably partly because the MSM scrambles to explain his mistakes away:

Keep talking about energy Barack, I dare you - I double dare you!