• • Pants-On-Fire Politics 
Ben Smith, BuzzFeed The convention's fixation on Obama's "you didn't build that" line [...] may have caricatured the president, a bit — but far less than Obama has flatly claimed. Obama invoked the phrase in his own battle with an Ayn Randian straw man — "people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart"— and he was making the case for a robust and respected government role in the private sector, a core of the electoral argument. To say he was taken out of context was to say his words were meant to be trivial and meaningless — that he was merely saying that his audience had not in fact constructed the road outside with their hands, an absurd interpretation.   Published: 2012-09-01