Amazingly, Andrew Breitbart’s “Big Government” website has topped their earlier incredibly stupid Dana Loesch post with an even more mind-bogglingly stupid post, this one by Larry O’Connor: Was President Obama Really Sitting in Front of an Assembly Line in this Video? - Big Government.

Once again, these geniuses are wrongly identifying ordinary compression artifacts in a low resolution image as evidence of tampering. This is how the right wing blogs hoodwink their gullible readers:

President Obama delivered his weekly address to the nation from Detroit, Michigan this week after visiting workers at a GM assembly plant.  When the video hit at Breitbart.tv, our tip box suddenly became very active with people claiming that the President was actually sitting in front of a green screen and the background image was really a composite image of an assembly line.

In the image below, you can see a black outline around the president’s shoulder, and you can see the background image slightly distorted around the president’s ear.

This is so dim-witted I can almost feel my IQ melting away. Notice that O’Connor doesn’t dispute that Obama was in Detroit (he was) or that he visited a GM plant and spoke to workers there. The “argument” (I hate to even dignify it with that term) is that he faked the video so the factory wouldn’t have to shut down, because that’s just how evil Barack Hussein Obama is!

Don’t bother looking for anything more sensible in this utterly risible piece — it’s not there.

Oh, and … here’s the video. You can watch it in 720p resolution, full screen, if you like. I did. And they definitely did not use a green screen; he was in the factory. These wingnuts are in a Bizarro universe all their own.

Notice that when they switch to a closeup, the background goes out of focus. That’s caused by a phenomenon known as “depth of field,” and it’s what happens when you switch to a closeup lens. The foreground is sharp, but the background is blurry.

It was amazingly evil of Obama to remember depth of field when they shot the video for the “green screen.”

Here’s a Reuters photo showing Obama at the same plant, and what looks like the same location as his video address, with South Korean president Lee Myung-bak: