Skip to main content

A choice of lying politicians? The McCain and Obama acceptance speeches...

... as parsed by Factcheck.org, show that nobody has the monopoly on distortion in this election.

Of Senator John McCain's acceptance speech, Factcheck found six major whoppers, including this one:

McCain claimed that Obama’s health care plan would "force small businesses to cut jobs" and would put "a bureaucrat ... between you and your doctor." In fact, the plan exempts small businesses, and those who have insurance now could keep the coverage they have.


In Senator Barack Obama's acceptance speech, Factcheck unearthed seven bigtime distortions, including this one:

Obama noted that McCain’s health care plan would "tax people’s benefits" but didn’t say that it also would provide up to a $5,000 tax credit for families.


Why is this comparison so important?

Because partisans of both sides love to run to Factcheck to bad-mouth their opponents, which is also essential used as a backhanded way of implying that their candidate is different.

For example, pandora at Delawareliberal recently chortled over Factcheck supposedly spanking the McCain-Palin team for their distortions, while completely ignoring a contemporary Factcheck report that Obama-Biden consciously distorts McCain's stand on education policy in its latest set of commercials.

The whole point of Factcheck's existence is to hold all politicians on the national stage accountable for their misstatements, distortions, and outright lies.

When you use the page only to highlight your opponent's failings, while glossing over the fact that your own candidate has been nailed just often, just as badly for the same practices, that's not change...

That's politics as usual.

And from the John McCain-Sarah Palin and Barack Obama-Joe Biden teams that all we're getting this year.

Comments

Why does this not surprise me?

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?