I know I pick on Patrick McIlheran a lot, but he just keeps writing the dumbest things. Like today’s “Quick Hit,” which I must quote in full:

Obama, Reagan and the world of make-believe

Barack Obama visited Mount Rushmore the other day, full of audacious curiosity. He asked a ranger about the chase scene across the monumental faces in [Alfred] Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” — “How did they get up there in the first place?” The Associated Press says he asked. “They didn’t. It was a movie set,” the ranger replied. One must note that when we had an ex-actor as president, he didn’t need that whole movies-are-make-believe bit explained to him, much as Reagan’s critics implied so.

There are two mendacious claims here. The first is that Barack Obama’s failure to realize that the Mt. Rushmore scene in North by Northwest was not filmed on location is evidence that he doesn’t understand that movies aren’t real life. That’s ridiculous. All it proves is that Obama doesn’t know much about making movies — hardly a disqualification for the presidency.

The second claim is that St. Ronald Reagan, contrary to his (no doubt liberal) critics, did understand that movies are make-believe. In fact, there is plentiful evidence that the late ex-President conflated film and real life on numerous occasions.

Let’s start with this:

Reagan regaled audiences about a B-17 pilot who would not bail out of his crippled plane on his way back from a European mission because his wounded gunner couldn’t make the jump. The pilot comforted the lad: “Never mind, son. We’ll ride it down together.” Reagan asserted that the pilot was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously.

However, military author-historian Lawrence H. Suid relates in his book “Guts & Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film,” that he couldn’t verify such a story, either through the White House or the Air Force History Office.

Suid eventually located the source. A World War II veteran recognized that the story was too perfectly similar to a scene in a popular 1944 air drama about the Battle of Midway, “A Wing and a Prayer,” starring Don Ameche and Dana Andrews. In a climactic scene, the radio operator tells his pilot that the plane is afire but he can’t move. The pilot returns, “I haven’t got the altitude, Mike. We’ll take this ride together.”

Also, a number of sources, including Ron Kampeas of the JTA News Service, report that Reagan, who spent World War II in Hollywood making training films, told both Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal about his experiences filming newly-liberated concentration camps. Sympathetic biographer Edmund Morris relates that while Reagan was involved in editing raw footage of the death camps and was genuinely horrified, “He (Reagan) would sometimes say, ‘I was there at the liberation of the camps. I was there with Eisenhower’s Army. I saw the Jews being liberated. I saw the dead bodies.’”

There are other examples I could recount. Next time McIlheran wants to slam Obama, he might think about having more evidence for his claims; next time he wants to defend Reagan, he might do some research first. (I here give him the benefit of the doubt — something he rarely gives liberals — and assume he was not deliberately lying.) Google is a good place to start, Patrick.