Bizarre: Out of all the questionable claims made by politicians and activists, the Washington Post chooses to fact-check President Obama's statement that the U.S. has “the most productive workers, the finest universities and the freest markets.”

If there's any doubt that such benign rhetorical statement is unworthy of the Fact-Checker treatment, just look at the Post's analysis.

The paper concludes that the “most productive workers” claim is a “stretch” because although a U.N. report “found that in 2008 the United States was number one when measured by gross domestic product per person engaged in work,” other studies put the U.S. in third place. So we aren't exactly talking about an “Iraq has WMD”-level lie.

The Post then purports to check the “finest universities” claim, though it notes that doing so is difficult because “there are so many different kinds of surveys out there and all are inherently subjective.” Now, when you find yourself using the phrase “inherently subjective” in a fact-check piece, it's probably a good idea to reconsider the whole exercise. Instead, the Post used just one of the “many different kinds of surveys” to assess the President's statement. And when that survey showed that the U.S. has 21 of the top 50 universities in the entire world, the Post invented some vague “number of world-class universities per million people” metric to rank the U.S. 8th.

And to assess President Obama's “freest markets” claim, the Post again relied upon only one study -- one conducted by the right-wing Heritage Foundation.