Presidential Candidates Lies: Update

**This is part of the I Love America That's Why I Vote! campaign. It's long but worth it.**

Back in November 2007, amid the huge number of Presidential candidates and the multiple debates I found the need to decipher all the polispeak and misinformation that was being bandied about. In the process I found a site PolitiFact that verified many of the issues that I was questioning.

I presented many of the outright lies that candidates of both parties had made. [In the post The lies Presidential candidates say, and the facts that prove it] Now with far fewer candidates, and more critical decisions being made by the remaining Primaries and Caucuses I feel it’s time to revisit and identify the current back of outright untruths, misstatements and polispeak intended to obscure the best candidates for America.

In alphabetical order I present the 3 remaining candidates of significance:

Senator Hillary Clinton - http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/personalities/hillary-clinton/statements/

“I was fighting against those (Republican) ideas when you were practicing law and representing your contributor, Rezko, in his slum landlord business in inner city Chicago.”

Besides the fact that the Clinton’s may have accepted contributions from this same individual, and definitely had taken photographs with him (as found after this statement) there is this…

“Clinton’s claim is Barely True. Obama, by his own admission, did some, albeit very little, legal work that helped Rezko’s company obtain properties that would later be neglected. But the allegations that Rezko was a slumlord did not arise, at least not publicly, until years after Obama performed that work.”

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"In her short time in the United States Senate, the senator from New York, Senator Clinton, got $500-million worth of pork barrel projects. My friends, that kind of thing is going to stop," McCain said.

Get ready because Senator McCain only got it partially right.

“Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group that tracks congressional spending, has identified about $2.2-billion in Clinton projects in her seven years in the Senate.”

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“The Bush administration sends mixed messages,” Clinton said during the Democratic debate in Las Vegas. “They want to recruit and retain these young people to serve our country and then they have the Pentagon trying to take away the signing bonuses when a soldier gets wounded and ends up in the hospital, something that I’m working with a Republican senator to try to make sure never can happen again.”

Sounds vital and horrendous. But the facts are

Defense Department policy is clear: Bonuses already paid should not be recouped if “injury or illness of the service member was not the result of the service member’s misconduct.”

The Army contends Fox’s was an isolated case. In fact, when it set up a hotline for pay problems, it received just two calls on that issue.

So are we talking about legislation to fix a problem that may have affected just three people? As it relates to wounded soldiers having to return portions of paid bonuses, perhaps. And certainly a lot of politicians made a lot of political hay about that…
So while Clinton highlights a legitimate issue — paying future installments of enlistment bonuses even after wounded veterans have been discharged — her wording is somewhat misleading, suggesting wounded veterans are being forced to return bonus money. There is little evidence to suggest that happened to more than a couple veterans, and the Army admitted its mistake.

Also misleading is her suggestion that there was some kind of Bush administration effort to deny future bonus payments promised to wounded vets…”

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“You’ve changed positions within three years on ... a range of issues that you put forth when you ran for the Senate,” Clinton said. “You said you would vote against the Patriot Act, then you came to the Senate, you voted for it.”

Careful where you point that finger.

“A closer examination reveals that while Clinton’s charge is technically correct, Obama went further than she did in trying to expand civil rights guarantees and give Democrats more chances to change the law…

Clinton, in contrast, joined 14 fellow Democrats and all of the Senate’s 55 Republicans in voting to shut off debate and proceed to a final vote on the compromise…

Once Obama’s faction lost the bid to keep the debate going, he voted for the compromise. The final tally was 95-4. Clinton was also among those senators voting yes…”

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“Well, actually, Tim, the (National) Archives is moving as rapidly as the Archives moves. There's about 20-million pieces of paper there and they are moving, and they are releasing as they do their process. And I am fully in favor of that. Now, all of the records, as far as I know, about what we did with health care, those are already available.”

Are they really?

“Clinton must be misinformed. It’s true that many of the documents from the unsuccessful health care effort that Sen. Clinton helmed are available, but there are several gaps in the record, such as her calendar and internal memos….

Also missing from the records are any correspondence on health care between her and former President Clinton.”

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“So that 2005 energy bill was a big step backwards on the path to clean, renewable energy,” said Clinton. “That’s why I voted against it. That’s why I’m standing for the proposition — let’s take away the giveaways that were given to gas and oil, put them to work on solar and wind and geothermal and biofuels and all of the rest that we need for a new energy future.”

Backwards?

“While the Energy Policy Act of 2005 did give the oil and gas industry tax breaks and incentives to boost production, the law also mandated 7.5-billion gallons of ethanol and other biofuels to be blended into gasoline by 2012 — the largest such mandate ever enacted and one widely credited with sparking an ethanol plant construction boom across the Midwest. The law also funneled hundreds of millions of dollars toward biomass research and the production of biofuels derived from the leaves, stems and stalks of a plant rather than corn kernels used to make ethanol.”

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Senator John McCain - http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/personalities/john-mccain/

“John McCain has attacked Hillary Clinton, saying she wants to “wave the white flag of surrender” in Iraq. He said it again in response to a question about Iraq at the Jan. 24, 2008, Republican debate in Boca Raton.”

Perhaps a bit overzealous

“McCain is right that Clinton is setting a time frame to start withdrawing troops, and that does imply giving up and waving a metaphorical white flag. Saying there is no military solution as she does could be seen as a form of surrender. But technically, there is no ruling army to surrender to, which is really what a white flag means. Clinton just wants the troops to come home.”

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“Congress just passed another huge, pork-filled spending bill. The Democrats allowed less than a day to read all 3,400 pages and stuffed it with nearly 10,000 earmarks costing about $10-billion dollars,” McCain said in remarks delivered to the Americans for Prosperity Michigan summit in a Detroit suburb.”

Wasteful spending yes. Just Democrats or the correct amount?

“The gist of his charge is true about spending, but his numbers are off and it's misleading to suggest all the parochial spending is being done by Democrats. When we add it up, we get Half-True.”

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"Our tax code is so complicated it extracts $140 billion in extra tax preparation costs every year - one thousand dollars for every American family. It’s offensive that six out of every ten taxpayers have to pay someone else just to figure out how to pay the government."

True but the numbers aren’t what you think

“A 2005 study by the Tax Foundation puts the value at closer to $111-billion. That would put the per-family cost at about $822.

But this is worth noting: The dollar figure for spending on tax preparation is a calculation of the value of the time people spend working on their taxes, which the Tax Foundation put at about $39 an hour, not how much they pay to tax pros. That’s not clear in McCain’s statement.”

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"The failings in our civil service are encouraged by a system that makes it very difficult to fire someone even for gross misconduct."

Pretty accurate there

“…McCain wisely faults not an individual but a "system." That puts him on pretty solid ground, where even a study by the federal government had difficulty finding supervisors who had attempted to take action against poorly performing employees.”

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Senator Barack Obama - http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/personalities/barack-obama/

“They've never paid more for gas at the pump."

Not true, even looking at the past

“We might have been inclined to cut Obama some slack for speaking in general terms about the price of gas, but he is still wrong when you look at historical levels. If you adjust for inflation, the current national price is still 41 cents below the peak of $3.39 per gallon, set in March 1981.”

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“They don’t want political talk. I’ll just give you one example. Sen. Clinton and I were debating and she was asked about the bankruptcy law that she voted for in 2001. . . . During the debate she said, you know, ‘I voted for it, but I hoped it wouldn’t pass.’ That was a quote on live TV. That kind of talk, I think it makes people not trust government.”

Close but it’s not accurate

“Here’s what Clinton said: “Sure I do, but it never became law, as you know. It got tied up. It was a bill that had some things I agreed with and other things I didn’t agree with, and I was happy that it never became law. I opposed the 2005 bill as well.”

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"If we went back to the obesity rates that existed in 1980, that would save the Medicare system a trillion dollars."

Health nuts must have loved this. Too bad it’s a made up number.

“We tracked down one of the authors of the study the CDC cited: Eric Finkelstein, a health economist with the research group RTI International who has studied the issue extensively and written several papers on the topic. Finkelstein said obesity accounts for excess health spending of about $90-billion a year. About half of that — about $45-billion — is billed to Medicare and Medicaid together.

Medicare's share of obesity spending therefore is between $20-billion and $25-billion. If obesity rates rolled back to 1980s levels, Medicare spending would be about half that, or about $12-billion a year.”

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I would list more items, but in general the candidates have, of late, been accurate in many of the comments they have made. Or at least accurate to some degree.

As noted via PolitiFact (check it out for yourself), the 3 candidates have a total of 15 outright lies and 31 barely or half true statements between them. The actual breakdown is as follows:

• Clinton – 3 outright lies, 13 barely or half true statements
  


• McCain – 5 outright lies, 10 barely or half true statements
  


• Obama – 7 outright lies, 8 barely or half true statements
  

Not too bad as politicians go, and perhaps as good as we can expect. Sad as that sounds. But now you know. Keep it in mind as you go to the Primaries. Think about it as you decide who you wish to have as President of the United States.

But no matter which you choose, make a choice. Decide who the best choice for America is and use your Constitutional Right to get that person elected. Your vote matters. Use it.