Oh, I'm sorry. I mean "inaccuracies."
Whatever you want to call them, the debaters last night in New Hampshire have not exactly passed the Pinocchio truth test at the Washington Post. The one Michele Bachmann threw out is so old and so often repeated that it can hardly escape being called a very intentional lie.
“The CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, has said that Obamacare will kill 800,000 jobs. What could the president be thinking by passing a bill like this, knowing full well it will kill 800,000 jobs?”
--Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.)
We hadn’t heard this yarn much since we debunked it four months ago with three Pinocchios. But here it has popped up again.
Another, um, "inaccuracy" -- this one from Romney -- is an oldie.
Obama “didn’t create the recession, but he made it worse and longer. And now we have more chronic long-term employment than this country has ever seen before.”
--Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney
In the first part of this statement, Romney is reprising a line from his announcement speech, but we didn’t think it was accurate then. It is still not accurate now.
After all, National Bureau of Economic Research, the nonpartisan research organization that identifies recessions, last year declared that the recession ended in June 2009 — two years ago. So, with NBER saying the economy is now out of a recession, it is difficult to see how Romney can claim that Obama made it worse.
I don't know how much exposure has been given to the recent assessment of when the recession started -- we usually peg it to the financial crash in 2007 -- but it in fact started in 2006, deep into Bush's second term.
But all of this is so much dust in the wind. Facts aren't given the stature "beliefs" are. Isn't that at the core of pretty much all of America's troubles?
