Malarkey for the third Presidential Debate of 2012

Once again, I turned to Fact Check.org to compile a score and discover the candidate who spouted the most malarkey and the winner (or should I say loser) was Romney. However, this time it was by a slim margin: Romney’s malarkey score 55.5% to Obama’s 44.4%.

Over the years as GOP candidates have continued to win the political malarkey competition, I’ve often wondered when the Democrats were going to wake up and learn to fight fire with fire. The turning point may have been in the third presidential debate as you will learn.

As always, I urge you to read the cited details on Fact Check.org.

The full transcript of the third presidential debate.

Romney:

1. It is not technically true that our “Navy is smaller now than any time since 1917″—a repeated claim made by Romney and Ryan during the VP debate.

2. Romney was wrong when he said Obama went on an apology tour of the Middle East and criticized America. The evidence clearly shows that Obama did not do this.

3. Romney claimed responsibility for the success of Massachusetts’ fourth and eighth graders who tested first in the nation in reading and math after he became governor. But that was wrong—Massachusetts students had tested at the top or near it before Romney took office.

4. Romney exaggerated the size of the federal debt held by the public and/or foreign countries such as China that he also mentioned in the second debate.

In fact, on April 10, 2012, foreign holdings of US Treasury Securities as of January 2012 increased to $5.048 Trillion (only 31.55%) with China reducing its share to $1.1595 Trillion (7.24%). The largest holders were the central banks of China, Japan, Brazil, Taiwan, United Kingdom, Switzerland and Russia. In addition, the US government owes itself $4.6 Trillion (28.75%). Source: Statistics Brain.com

5. Romney was wrong when he claimed that in the 2000 presidential debate there was no mention of terrorism, because Al Gore did make one mention of terrorism in the third debate with G. W. Bush on October 17, 2000.

6. I’m going to add number SIX because Fact Check.org missed this example of malarkey that they seem to have missed every time it has been used in every debate.

Even Obama seems to have missed this one. Romney keeps saying that 23 million Americans are unemployed and looking for work. Twenty-three million is a huge exaggeration when the Bureau of Labor Statistic of the U.S. Department of Labor reported on October 5, 2012 that “The number of unemployed persons, at 12.1 million, decreased by 456,000 in September.” In addition, “the unemployment rates for adult men (7.3 percent), adult women (7.0 percent), and whites (7.0 percent) declined over the month.

“The unemployment rates for teenagers (23.7 percent), blacks (13.4 percent), and Hispanics (9.9 percent) were little changed. The jobless rate for Asians, at 4.8 percent (not seasonally adjusted), fell over the year.” Source: bls.org

Even if we add in the 2.5 million persons that are not counted as unemployed because they did not look for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey, we still do not come up with 23 million.

And we could add the 802,000 discouraged workers that gave up because they believe no jobs are available for them and Romney’s continued claim of 23 million looking for work still doesn’t add up. If Romney included this number, he was wrong, because these people are not looking for work.

It is obvious to me that Romney’s repeated claim of 23 million unemployed is to mislead adult voters to believe the economic situation is much worse than it is—almost a hundred percent worse.

Obama:

1. Obama claimed that during the 2008 campaign Romney said “we should ask Pakistan for permission” before going into that country to kill or capture terrorists. That was not true.

2. Obama went too far when he accused Romney of not telling the truth about Obama’s position on leaving a residual force of U.S. troops in Iraq. Obama was partly correct but did not clarify the details of this disagreement.

3. Obama was wrong when he insisted over and over that Romney never advocated “help” or “government assistance” for automakers if they went through bankruptcy.

4. Obama claimed that Romney once called Russia, not al Qaeda, the “biggest geopolitical threat facing America.” This was wrong. Romney said a Nuclear Iran was America’s greatest threat.

Conclusion: The final score, once my #6 was added, was 60% for Romney and 40% for Obama.

See the previous posts about the use of malarkey in the Presidential and VP debates:

Malarkey

The Malarkey Score for the 2nd Presidential Debate

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, is the award winning author of The Concubine Saga.

His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”

The Malarkey Score for the 2nd Presidential Debate

Who won the Malarkey contest in the second presidential debate?

My wife and I think that President Obama deliberately tanked the first debate. Here is why we think this. It’s a popular plot for film and novels that a character starts out looking as if he or she is going to fail and/or lose because the odds are against him or her, and then he or she turns it around and comes back like a Rocky Balboa. Many Americans love to see an underdog take a beating as the victim of a bully, and then stand up and fight back to win later when the odds seem stacked against him or her. An example of this is the classic It’s a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey that is popular around the Christmas and New Year holidays. Then there is Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

There is a bully in both of these films, and the winner of the malarkey contest will reveal who the bully is in this Post’s plot.

Fact Check.org said, “The second Obama-Romney debate was heated, confrontational and full of claims that sometimes didn’t match the facts.”

After I compared the claims that did not match facts, Romney’s score was 367% higher than Obama’s. This means that Romney won the spitting contest for malarkey, but lost to his vice presidential running mate who scored 433% for the use of malarkey in the VP debate.

As usual, I wanted to compare the claims of each candidate that did not match the facts. However, it wasn’t easy keeping score this time, and I had to avoid the Summary and focus on the more detailed Analysis at Fact Check.org. If a candidate said something that was correct, it will not appear in this comparison. If you want to see more details with links to cited sources, I recommend clicking Fact Check.org.

Romney’s Malarkey Score

1. Romney was wrong when he claimed Obama waited 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi and act of terror. In fact, Obama said in the Rose Garden speech the day of the attack that “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation …”

2. Romney changed his campaign statement about cutting taxes for the wealthy, and when Obama pointed this out, Romney tone and the substance of his reply did not match what he has been saying on the campaign trail. Obama was correct.

3. Romney was wrong when he said “the middle class will see $4,000 per year in higher taxes as a result of Obama’s fiscal policies. It seems that Romney was quoting an opinionated AEI blogger and, in fact, there is no proof this will happen.

4. Romney was wrong about women’s jobs. He said “in the last four years, women have lost 580,000 jobs” under President Obama. But that loss was really 93,000, making Romney’s exaggerated false-claim six times higher. Fact Check.com then mentions that in the last four months of the Bush presidency, 833,000 women lost jobs and the large majority of women’s job were lost before Obama was sworn in as president.

5. When Obama claimed Romney said he would let Detroit (the auto industry) go bankrupt and a million more jobs would have been lost, Romney defended himself saying that he meant he was against a government bailout but for a managed bankruptcy. However, a Congressional Research Service Report said that without U.S. Government assistance, GM would not have been able to survive the bankruptcy. I cannot call this a lie or false or an exaggerations but it may indicate that Romney was ignorant about the danger of the US losing its auto industry. Something I haven’t heard mentioned yet is the fact that the US auto industry is vital to the defense of the United States in case of a conventional war. During World War II, the US auto industry was a crucial factor in turning out more weapons than Nazi Germany and Japan.

6. Romney has made confusing and conflicting statements about Pell Grants for college students. Fact Check.org shows that Romney does not seem to have a fixed position on this issue, but pretends that he does.

7. Romney made the misleading claim (an inflated exaggeration that ignores many facts) that “gasoline prices have gone up $2,000.” … “But the $2,000 figure is greatly inflated because gasoline prices were much higher during most of 2008 than they were at the moment Obama was sworn in.”

8. Romney claimed that Obama “doubled” the deficit. Romney was wrong. Obama inherited a projected $1.2 trillion deficit when he took office and the deficits remained high. However, what Fact Check.org does not say is that Obama had no choice. Revenues from taxes were down and could not be increased without raising taxes, while the cost of running the government increased 20%. In fact, Obama did not “double” the deficit with new, carless spending programs as Romney inferred. For example, many programs such as Social Security and Medicare are mandated by law and cannot be changed without cooperation from Congress.

9. Romney accused Obama of saying “NO” to an oil pipeline from Canada, which isn’t entirely accurate making this one a false claim. In fact, no final decision has been made yet on this pipeline and the project stands a good chance of being approved early in 2013.

10. Romney claimed health insurance premiums have gone up by $2,500. Fact Check.org says, “Not True.”

11. Romney claimed, as he has in many campaign speeches across the country, that Obama “said that by now we’d have unemployment at 5.4 percent.” This is a false claim. In fact, Romney is referring to a speculative report issued at the beginning of Obama’s presidency projecting the lower unemployment rate. It was a prediction—not a promise.

Obama’s Malarkey Score

1. Obama was wrong when he claimed that Romney called Arizona’s 2010 immigration enforcement law “a model for the nation”.

2. Obama misquoted something Romney said about renewable energy.

3. Obama claimed he would return tax rates for the richest Americans to where they had been under President Clinton. However, according to the numbers, these rich people will actually pay more in federal taxes under Obama’s proposed rates than they did under Clinton.

Note: For anyone that wants to discover more Malarkey for each candidate, I have provided this link to a written transcript of the debate and there is the embedded video in this post of the complete debate. However, for Malarkey to count, there must be evidence equal to the quality of evidence that Fact Check.org uses to support what is reported on its site.

See my posts about the First 2012 Presidential Debate and Two days after the first 2012 Presidential Debate.

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, is the award winning author of The Concubine Saga.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”

Malarkey

The word that is the title for this post sums up most of Mitt Romney’s campaign for president of the US. And Vice President Joe Biden, if you didn’t notice, used the term in his debate with Ryan three times.

Vera H-C Chan writing for The Ticket explained the loaded message behind Biden’s use of ‘malarkey’.

Chan wrote, “‘Malarkey,’ as Merriam-Webster defines it, is ‘insincere or foolish talk.’ It’s a dismissive word to use, with avuncular overtones, and you’d use it to deem something as silliness, bunkum, hogwash—verging on nonsense, you (and a thesaurus) might even say.”

I read that many viewers of the debate turned to the Internet to discover what ‘malarkey’ meant, but I didn’t have to turn to the Internet thanks to my Irish heritage through my father. Lofthouse is a common name in England and Ireland—not Germany as many may think when first hearing my last name.

After the first use of ‘malarkey,’ Raddatz asked what ‘bunch of stuff’ meant and Biden replied, “We Irish call it malarkey.”

If you are interested, here is a link to a printed transcript of the debate. Why look? Because it is easy to be distracted and miss details when watching TV or listening to radio. And if you don’t want to read it, I have embedded the video of the entire debate with this post so you may watch it as many times as you want to. After all, the same issues (and ‘malarkey’) that were debated between Romney and President Obama were repeated between Biden and Ryan.

But what it is that Ryan claimed (repeating many of the same claims that Romney made in the first Presidential debate) during the only vice-presidential debate that is malarkey?

To discover that answer, I turned to Fact Check.org. Before I go on, I want to mention that the Republican Party has done a ‘bunch of stuff’ on Fact Check.org to cast doubts on the results they report. When your political party, the GOP, lies more than the competition, it stands to reason that the results will skew against you and you will attempt to discredit the source.

However, if you click on the link and read the fact checking of the VP debate at Fact Check.org, scroll to the end and notice the sources used. Each source—I counted thirty-seven—has a link for anyone to back check what is reported on this site. Unlike politicians, Fact Check.org hides nothing and attempts no ‘malarkey’.

Fact Check used such terms as exaggeration, not true, wrong and false to describe each example of ‘malarkey’. The Fact Check.org piece starts with a ‘Summary’, and then a much more detailed ‘Analysis’ of each example of ‘malarkey’ follows.

I do not want to copy and paste what Fact Check.org reported, but I will provide a comparative score from the Summary.

Ryan: wrong, wrong, not true, misquoted, not quite, false claim, off-base, collection of misstatements: not true; no, they haven’t; maybe—and a misleading claim.

Biden: exaggerated, misquoted Romney, and again misrepresented the findings of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

The high score reveals the most ‘malarkey’. Ryan’s score was ELEVEN (actually it is THIRTEEN as you shall see) and Biden’s score was THREE. If you divide three into THIRTEEN, we discover that the GOP’s Romney and Ryan used ‘malarkey’ 433 percent more than the Obama and Biden campaign did in this one debate.

In addition, there is a HUGE difference between Ryan’s USE OF WRONG (twice), NOT TRUE (twice), and a FALSE CLAIM in comparison to Biden’s use of ONE EXAGGERATION, ONE MISQUOTE and ONE MISREPRESENTED FACT.

I left out one of Ryan’s misleading claims of Hillary Clinton calling Assad “a different leader” and “a reformer”. It is true that she did say this in an interview, but she was only reporting what a few congressmen had told her after a congressional visit to Syria to gather facts well before the civil war in Syria broke out. What Ryan did not report was that later Hillary made it clear that President Obama’s administration did not say or agree with what those few congressmen had reported—something Ryan left out of his misleading claim—another use of ‘malarkey’.

Then there is ‘malarkey’ that Fact Check.org did not mention. In an attempt to paint President Obama weak on defense, and I’m sure conservatives will grab this “malarkey” and continue to use it, Ryan said, “If these cuts go through, our Navy will be the smallest—the smallest it has been since before World War I.”

Think about this fact being used to paint Obama weak on defense. In World War I, all military transport to Europe for troops, weapons and supplies was done mostly by the US Navy.

Who moves the most US troops, equipment and supplies today?

Answer: the US Air Force. America is the only country in the world with the capability of moving armies in days to any spot on the planet—not in weeks or months—that is because of an air force that is 663% larger than Russia’s air force and 352% larger than China’s.

In addition, the United States has the largest Navy in the world with twelve aircraft carriers (with two more under construction—sixteen other naval ships are also under construction) and 3,700 operational naval aircraft.

Global Firepower.com lists 2,385 ships in the US Navy (counting ships held in reserve in case of a conventional global war). But, how long has it been since the United States fought a war with another major naval power?

The answer to that question is easy: sixty-seven years—the end of World War II in 1945.

Russia, listed as the second most powerful nation militarily has 233 naval ships with only one aircraft carrier, and China, listed third, has 972 ships in her navy with one used, Russian aircraft carrier that is more than twenty-years old. In fact, there are ten countries with aircraft carriers in service—two countries have two and seven each have one carrier.

The US Air Force has 18,234 total aircraft, Russia has 2,749 and China 5,176 military aircraft. Need I say more about this example of Ryan’s use of malarkey?

See the Post about the First Presidential Debate and/or the one Two Days after that Debate

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, is the award winning author of The Concubine Saga.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper left-hand column and click on “FOLLOW!”