The American Pundit

A nice catch by Gawker’s Jalopnik. The man who brought you a revision of WWII liberation history brings you this little diddy about the history of automobiles:

In tonight’s mini-State of the Union, President Obama said the “nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.”

But as Jalopnik notes, we didn’t invent the automobile. The man regarded as its inventor is Karl Benz, as in Mercedes-Benz, of Germany. Wiki:

Karl Friedrich Benz, sometimes spelled as Carl, (November 16, 1844, Karlsruhe, – April 4, 1929, Ladenburg, Germany) was a German engine designer and automobile engineer, generally regarded as the inventor of the gasoline-powered automobile and pioneering founder of the automobile manufacturer, Mercedes-Benz. Other German contemporaries, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach working as partners, also worked on similar types of inventions, without knowledge of the work of the other, but Benz patented his work first and, after that, patented all of the processes that made the internal combustion engine feasible for use in automobiles. In 1879 Benz was granted a patent for his first engine, which he designed in 1878.

I take it Obama didn’t make up the little anecdote on the spot, which would mean it was written into the speech. Did no one actually Google the claim before making it?