Fox Nation is distorting comments President Obama made about the economy to suggest that he called an 8.5 percent unemployment a “success.” In fact, Obama made clear in his comments that he believes “we have a lot more work to do” to continue improving the economy.

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that employment rose by 200,000 jobs in December and that the unemployment rate “continued to trend down” to 8.5 percent. In comments later that day, President Obama said: “we're making progress. We're moving in the right direction.”

Indeed, the BLS reported that the unemployment rate has dropped 0.6 percentage points since August and employment in the private sector increased by 1.9 million jobs in 2011, marking the strongest employment growth in the private sector since 2005.

Fox Nation is treating Obama's comments as some type of victory lap, suggesting that he called the 8.5 percent unemployment rate a “success”:

Obama did no such thing.

In fact, he made clear in his remarks on the jobs report that he was not satisfied with the current level of unemployment, and that more work needs to be done to continue improving the economy:

This morning, we learned that American businesses added another 212,000 jobs last month. Altogether, more private sector jobs were created in 2011 than any year since 2005. And there are a lot of people that are still -- (applause) -- there are a lot of people that are still hurting out there. After losing more than 8 million jobs in the recession, obviously we have a lot more work to do. But it is important for the American people to recognize that we've now added 3.2 million new private sector jobs over the last 22 months -- nearly 2 million jobs last year alone. So after shedding jobs for more than a decade, our manufacturing sector is also adding jobs two years in a row now. So we're making progress. We're moving in the right direction.

[...]

And the American people I think rightly understand that there are still a lot of struggles that people are going through out there. A lot of families are still having a tough time. A lot of small businesses are still having a tough time. But we're starting to rebound. We're moving in the right direction. We have made real progress. Now is not the time to stop. So I would urge Congress to make sure that they stay on top of their jobs to make sure that everybody else is able to enjoy hopefully an even more robust recovery in 2012.

So the economy is moving in the right direction. We're creating jobs on a consistent basis. We're not going to let up -- not until everybody who wants to find a good job can find one. But we have a responsibility to do even more than just try to recover from this devastating recession and financial crisis. We have a responsibility to make sure that the economy that we're rebuilding is one where middle-class families feel like they can get ahead again.