In the words of Queen Botox, “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

Via Hot Air, we offer this…

“But here’s what I can tell you: After 18 months, I have never been more confident that our nation is headed in the right direction.”

That was Barack Obama yesterday, when he did his little Ohio dog-and-pony show with a bunch of hand-picked union stewards, donors and Democrat activists in shirtsleeves.

Strangely, though, reality only rarely cooperates with the President’s rhetoric. Along came this bit of news today…

In the week ending Aug. 14, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 500,000, an increase of 12,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 488,000. The 4-week moving average was 482,500, an increase of 8,000 from the previous week’s revised average of 474,500.

Ed Morrissey plotted the new jobless figures for 2010 so far and came up with this…

Does that look like “right track” to you? The only substantial relief all year came over the July 4 holidays, when people decided to drink beer and barbeque instead of filing for unemployment.

And of course, Rasmussen’s latest poll has 67 percent of the respondents saying “wrong track” and only 28 percent saying “right track.” In case you’re tempted to say “Ahhh, that’s just Rasmussen. He’s a Republican shill,” his numbers are pretty close to those found by James Carville, Bob Shrum and Stan Greenberg at Democracy Corps, which had the wrong-tracks ahead by 64-29.

But Obama laid another whopper down as well. We’ll let the Heritage Foundation take it from here:

Responding to a question about Social Security, the President insisted: “So here’s the thing. Social Security is not in crisis.” Oh yes it is.

The debate about whether Social Security needs to be fixed is over. The 2010 Social Security Trustees Report, released on August 5, shows that the program will run cash-flow deficits in both 2010 and 2011 due to the effects of the recession. Then in 2015, Social Security will begin to inflict massive permanent annual deficits on American taxpayers. And Social Security is just one of the Big Three entitlements (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) that is set to bankrupt our country. Unless major reforms are made, spending on just these three programs alone will consume all federal government revenues by 2052. According to the International Monetary Fund, over the next 20 years the United States will experience the second highest projected increase of all the G20 countries in health care and pension spending as a share of GDP.

We can bat around the Ground Zero Mosque, the Arizona immigration issue, the ignominious marriage of Chicago politics and race-hustling promoted by this administration or even our inexplicable foreign policy all we want. But the number one reason Obama and his party are in such major trouble is the incredible disconnect between what they see on our economy and our deficits and what he’s attempting to show.