Obama, Biden a Pinocchio duo
Did you watch President Obama and Vice President Biden give their acceptance speeches at the Democratic National Convention? Well, the folks at FactCheck.org did and if you watched closely, you could actually see the dynamic duo's noses start to grow.
According to Mark Stencel, managing editor for digital news at National Public Radio (hardly a bastion for conservative reporting), several stories were told and spun by both men. How about the one about President Obama's mother and the struggles she had with her insurance company as she was dying of cancer. The NPR official concludes that the president and other speakers failed to specify that the insurance issue was her disability claim, not her health coverage as the story still suggests.
FactCheck begins its report by noting that Obama “boasted that his plan would cut the deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years, citing “independent experts.” But one such analyst called a key element of the plan a “gimmick.”
FactCheck also takes issue with Biden for quoting Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney as saying “it's not worth moving heaven and earth” to catch Osama bin Laden. “Actually,” FactCheck writes, “Romney said he would target more than just ‘one person.'” Biden also gets knocked for saying Romney “believes it's OK to raise taxes on middle classes by $2,000.” Actually, FactCheck writes, Romney “promises to lower middle-class taxes.”
And FactCheck notes that when the president quoted Romney as saying it was “tragic” to “end the war in Iraq,” he didn't mention that “Romney was criticizing was the pace of Obama's troop withdrawal, not ending a war.”
Even The Associated Press got in on fact-checking by saying that “President Barack Obama laid claim to a peace dividend that doesn't exist when he told the nation he wants to use money saved by ending wars to build highways, schools and bridges. The wars were largely financed by borrowing, so there is no ready pile of cash to be diverted to anything else.”
The AP also questions a figure cited by Biden and many others that “after the worst job loss since the Great Depression, we've created 4.5 million private sector jobs in the past 29 months.” The wire service notes that “This seems to be a favorite statistic, because many speakers at the convention cited it. But it's misleading — a figure that counts jobs from when the recession reached its trough and employment began to grow again. It excludes jobs lost earlier in Obama's term, and masks the fact that joblessness overall has risen over Obama's term so far ... overall, some 7.5 million jobs were lost during the recession that began in December 2007 in President George W. Bush's term and ended officially in June 2009 with Obama as president.”
Also, PolitiFact gives the president a “half true” rating for saying that he's got a plan that so-called “independent analysis” has said will cut the deficit by $4 trillion. But PolitiFact states that “We found that the ‘independent' source that supports that claim is a liberal think tank. Another group, one that puts a premium on deficit reduction, gives the president credit for moving in the right direction but thinks he won't get as far as he says he will. They think the president's plan might get close to the $3 trillion mark, but not $4 trillion.”
Gregory Gardner
Yuma
