Golly gee! Messiah can lie shamelessly too

[metta 0]

Closing the Whopper Gap

By Ruth Marcus

Washington Post

Monday, September 22, 2008; Page A15

The symmetry of sin is suddenly looking more equal. Last week, I flayed John McCain for dishonesty -- flagrant and repeated dishonesty -- about Barack Obama's proposals. Obama was by no means blameless, I argued, but his lapses were nowhere near as egregious as his opponent's. I stand by everything I wrote. But a series of new Obama attacks requires a rebalancing of the scales: Obama has descended to similarly scurrilous tactics on the stump and on the air. On immigration, Obama is running a Spanish-language ad that unfairly lumps McCain together with Rush Limbaugh -- and quotes Limbaugh out of context. On health care, Obama misleadingly accuses McCain of wanting to impose a $3.6 trillion tax hike on employer-provided insurance.

Obama has been furthest out of line, however, on Social Security, stooping to the kind of scare tactics he once derided.

"If my opponent had his way, the millions of Floridians who rely on it would have had their Social Security tied up in the stock market this week," Obama said Saturday as he campaigned in that retiree-heavy state. "Millions of families would've been scrambling to figure out how to give their mothers and fathers, their grandmothers and grandfathers, the secure retirement that every American deserves."

This is simply false -- even leaving aside the incendiary language about "privatizing" Social Security. As the invaluable FactCheck.org noted, the private account plan suggested by President Bush and backed by McCain would not have applied to anyone born before 1950. It would not have changed benefits by a single penny for current retirees like the nice Florida folks that Obama was trying to rile up. The sensible notion was that workers at or near retirement age should be able to rely on promised benefits and should not be subject to the vicissitudes of short-term market fluctuations.

There is a fair argument to be had about the wisdom of having workers invest part of their Social Security taxes in private accounts. This year's plunge buttresses the contention that such accounts are too risky to comprise even part of what was conceived, after all, to serve as a safety net.

But Obama's cartoon version of private accounts is not what Bush suggested, and it certainly is not something being peddled by McCain now. Under Bush's plan, workers would have been able to invest less than a third of their Social Security taxes in private accounts. Unless they specifically chose a riskier course, workers, beginning at age 47, would have had their investments put in "life-cycle portfolios" that shifted from high-growth funds to more secure bonds as retirement approached.

Obama's ads on Social Security are equally misleading. "Cutting benefits in half, risking Social Security on the stock market," it warns. "The Bush-McCain privatization plan. Can you really afford more of the same?"

Cutting benefits in half? As FactCheck notes, "this is a rank misrepresentation." No one at or near retirement age would have been affected. Those retiring in the future would not have received benefits as big as what they have been promised under current law -- but those promises cannot be paid for under the current system or even through the payroll tax increase on the wealthy that Obama has proposed.

The Bush plan would have limited benefits for some workers to growing at the rate of inflation rather than at the generally faster pace of wages. In other words, these workers would be getting benefits equal in real dollar value to those received by current retirees. But under the "progressive price indexing" approach endorsed by the president, lower-income workers would continue to receive all their promised benefits; medium-income workers would have their benefits reduced somewhat; and high-income workers would take the biggest hit.

The Obama campaign stretches the truth beyond recognition when it says that this would cut benefits in half. Under progressive price indexing, the average-earning worker would see a 28 percent cut in promised benefits -- in 2075. In other words, trims of that magnitude would affect workers not yet born. Today's average-earning 25-year-old would experience much smaller reductions in promised benefits upon reaching retirement age -- more like 16 percent.

And the only way the Obama campaign can inflate the supposed benefit cut to "half" is by assuming that the change in calculating benefit growth would be applied to all workers, not just the top tier. In that case, workers not yet born would get 49 percent of the benefits not yet promised to them by 2075. Doubt these numbers? They come from Jason Furman, now the Obama campaign's chief economic adviser.

To Democrats who worry about whether their nominee is willing to do whatever it takes to win: You can calm down.

marcusr@washpost.com

Edited September 22, 2008 by metta

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

To Democrats who worry about whether their nominee is willing to do whatever it takes to win: You can calm down.

Good.

Maybe facts don't matter

By Farhad Manjoo, Slate

Published Wednesday, September 17, 2008 7:27 PM

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Since July, John McCain and his campaign have made 11 political claims that are barely true, eight that are categorically false, and three that you'd have to call pants-on-fire lies — a total of 22 clearly deceptive statements (many of them made repeatedly in ads and stump speeches).

Barack Obama and Joe Biden, meanwhile, have put out eight bare truths, four untruths, and zero pants-on-fire lies — 12 false claims. These stats and categories come from the St. Petersburg Times' PolitiFact.com, but the story looks pretty much the same if you count up fabrications documented by FactCheck.org or the Washington Post's Fact Checker, the other truth-squad operations working the race: During the past 2½ months, McCain has lied more often and more outrageously than Obama.

Of course, it isn't possible to prove in any scientific manner that McCain is being more deceptive than Obama. Judging political lies is a bit like trying to evaluate bad American Idol performances; we agree that they all kind of suck, but we can still have endless fights about which ones suck the least.

Some of McCain's recent claims, though, are the William Hungs of political lies: so heroically deceptive that anyone not blinded by partisanship feels the urge to cover his ears. Take McCain's ad claiming that Obama's "one accomplishment" on education policy was to push "legislation to teach 'comprehensive sex education' to kindergartners." It's difficult to find a single true word in the whole spot. The Illinois Senate bill the ad refers to was not Obama's legislation. (He voted for it but didn't write or sponsor it.) It was not an "accomplishment" — the bill didn't pass. Nor did it advocate teaching kids about sex before they learned to read, as McCain claims; it envisioned "age-appropriate" language instructing children on "preventing sexual assault," among other dangers, and it allowed parents to hold their kids out of these classes.

Obama, too, has run deceptive ads. He edited a McCain quote to suggest that the senator favors trucking nuclear waste through Nevada but not through his home state of Arizona — a trick that renders the spot barely true. And Obama claimed McCain doesn't support auto industry loan guarantees, which used to be true but no longer is.

But Obama's ads employ the routine deceptions of politics — they exaggerate the opponent's positions, they play fast and loose with dates, they draw convenient inferences from strings of unrelated events. Yet they also contain a few actual facts. That's not high praise, but it reaches a higher standard than McCain's accusation that Obama called Sarah Palin a pig. Or McCain's insinuation that FactCheck.org found Obama making "false" attacks on Palin — a complete distortion of FactCheck's finding that anonymous e-mailers were attacking Palin.

The McCain camp's other sin is one of repetition: They keep saying things that have been proved untrue. In TV ads and nearly every stump speech, Palin has repeated the line that she stopped the federal government's plan to build the "bridge to nowhere," a claim that fact-check sites and nearly every major news organization have shot down. McCain keeps running ads stating that Obama would raise taxes on the middle class when Obama's plan would actually lower taxes for most people.

On several occasions, Obama has adjusted his message when called out by fact-checkers. Last month PolitiFact wrote that Biden was wrong to say McCain voted with Bush 95 percent of the time. Shortly thereafter, the Obama camp began using a more accurate measure, 90 percent.

This is exactly what's so puzzling about Obama's strategy — why is he paying any attention to the fact-checkers? So far, McCain has seen little blowback from lying. Polls show that he's perceived as more "honest and trustworthy" than Obama and that the public believes his claim that Obama would raise taxes on the middle class.

In my book True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society, published earlier this year, I argued that in the digital world, facts are a stock of faltering value. The phenomenon that scholars call "media fragmentation" — the disintegration of the mass media into the many niches of the Web, cable news, and talk radio — lets us consume news that we like and avoid news that we don't, leading people to perceive reality in a way that conforms to their long-held beliefs.

In the past, Democratic voters have been willing to accept lies. Researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that in 2004, the Kerry campaign managed to convince Americans that 3-million jobs had been lost during George W. Bush's first term (at the time of the election, it was less than 2-million) and that Bush "favored sending American jobs overseas." (He didn't.) Kerry and others on the left repeated these claims often, and in time they took root.

The misstatements of 2004 suggest a category of lies that Obama could get away with — ones that the public is already primed to believe about McCain. What about that 100-years war? Picture an Obama ad showing McCain saying that the war in Iraq will last 100 — or even 1,000! — years. The ad patches in footage of McCain singing "bomb Iran" and describing all the devastating effects of war. Actually, that ad exists—a comedy group posted it on YouTube in February. Nearly 2-million people have watched it. It's hilarious, effective, and a complete lie. Obama's advisers should be pushing him to approve that message.

[Ban Hammer 14,269]

but.......haven't you learned? it's ok for the dems to lie!

[no name 1]

factcheck.org

Analysis

In our "Scaring Seniors" article posted Sept. 19 we took apart a claim in an Obama-Biden ad that McCain somehow supported a 50 percent cut in Social Security benefits, which is simply false. Then, on Saturday Sept. 20, Sen. Barack Obama personally fed senior citizens another whopper, this one a highly distorted claim about the private Social Security accounts that McCain supports.

What Obama Said

In Daytona Beach, Florida, Obama said in prepared remarks released by the campaign:

Obama, Sept. 20: And I'll protect Social Security, while John McCain wants to privatize it. Without Social Security half of elderly women would be living in poverty - half. But if my opponent had his way, the millions of Floridians who rely on it would've had their Social Security tied up in the stock market this week. Millions would've watched as the market tumbled and their nest egg disappeared before their eyes. Millions of families would've been scrambling to figure out how to give their mothers and fathers, their grandmothers and grandfathers, the secure retirement that every American deserves. So I know Senator McCain is talking about a "casino culture" on Wall Street - but the fact is, he's the one who wants to gamble with your life savings.

That's untrue. All current retirees would be covered by exactly the same Social Security benefits they are now under what the Obama campaign likes to call the "Bush-McCain privatization plan," which Bush pushed for unsuccessfully in 2005.

Edited September 22, 2008 by illumine

[metta 0]

Here's looking at you , kid...

http://www.visajourney.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=152513

the flash supernova of U.S. politics is seen "competing" with a second-on-the-ticket female governor of a remote state. There's more than a gap between the "audacity of hope" and "lipstick on a pig."The mouth that spoke the first phrase should not be capable of the second.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

Politifact keeps a running total on the quality of the candidates claims.

McSame is in a league of his own when it comes to lies - nobody beats him at that game.

Obama's statements by ruling

* True 41

* Mostly True 24

* Half True 23

* Barely True 14

* False 19

* Pants on Fire 1

McCain's statements by ruling

* True 25

* Mostly True 22

* Half True 19

* Barely True 22

* False 23

* Pants on Fire 6

http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/

[Marilyn. 340]

don't you guys know by now that all politicians lie.. they will say anything to get themselves elected...

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

don't you guys know by now that all politicians lie.. they will say anything to get themselves elected...

True. That's what it takes in this country - and elsewhere.

Good thing Obama is starting to play the game the way it is played.

[Pooky 3,874]

Here is an old adage for all of you.

How can you tell when a politician is lying?

Their lips are moving!

[jundp 191]

As a Christian, I am insulted that people keep calling Obama "the Messiah."

I'm voting for him, but he sure as heck isn't my Messiah. #######?

Oh and I forgot:

[Pooky 3,874]

As a Christian, I am insulted that people keep calling Obama "the Messiah."

I'm voting for him, but he sure as heck isn't my Messiah. #######?

Oh and I forgot:

You're slipping. The bunny's pancake almost flopped.

[jundp 191]

You're slipping. The bunny's pancake almost flopped.

Egads. I'll work on that. May have to switch to the waffle soon.

[Pooky 3,874]

You're slipping. The bunny's pancake almost flopped.

Egads. I'll work on that. May have to switch to the waffle soon.

MmmmmmmmmmmMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaffffffffffffffffffffffffffle.

[jundp 191]

We hijacked the thread.

[Pooky 3,874]

WooHoo!