AP fact-checks the speech: Obama was pretty much lying through his teeth
By my count, they fact-check 7 of his statements last night and find that he was lying or obfuscating on 5 of them, which means he was telling the truth 28% of the time.
The whopper of the evening was that ObamaCare won’t add a dime to the deficit.
THE FACTS: Though there’s no final plan yet, the White House and congressional Democrats already have shown they’re ready to skirt the no-new-deficits pledge.House Democrats offered a bill that the Congressional Budget Office said would add $220 billion to the deficit over 10 years. But Democrats and Obama administration officials claimed the bill actually was deficit-neutral. They said they simply didn’t have to count $245 billion of it — the cost of adjusting Medicare reimbursement rates so physicians don’t face big annual pay cuts.
Their reasoning was that they already had decided to exempt this “doc fix” from congressional rules that require new programs to be paid for. In other words, it doesn’t have to be paid for because they decided it doesn’t have to be paid for.
On the tired, dusty old lie that ‘if you like your plan, you can keep it,’ AP says it is word games. It is not for you to decide whether your employer allows you to keep your plan.
OBAMA: “Nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have.”THE FACTS: That’s correct, as far as it goes. But neither can the plan guarantee that people can keep their current coverage. Employers sponsor coverage for most families, and they’d be free to change their health plans in ways that workers may not like, or drop insurance altogether.
AP sort of backs up Obama on the claim that ‘Illegals won’t get coverage,’ which inspired Joe Wilson to call Obama a liar. But note the caveat.
The House version of the health care bill explicitly prohibits spending any federal money to help illegal immigrants get health care coverage. Illegal immigrants could buy private health insurance, as many do now, but wouldn’t get tax subsidies to help them. Still, Republicans say there are not sufficient citizenship verification requirements to ensure illegal immigrants are excluded from benefits they are not due.
That caveat is the hole through which illegals will get covered. Wilson was right.
They go through a few more biggies and basically come to the conclusion that Obama obviously could never get this thing past the American people unless he lies about it. So he lies.
Post Your Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment
T/S Members
Log in with your True/Slant account.
You know, the problem with writing pieces calling someone on lying (and, by the way, I think the AP article was correct in most instances), is that it does impose some obligation on the writer- that being you – to expend a bit of effort to not be caught lying yourself.
I’ve read the article. Just went and read it again. The article purports to deal only with the omissions and over-simplifications of the speech. It does not purport to deal with the elements that would be fact checked as having been correct and true.
“They go through a few more biggies and basically come to the conclusion that Obama obviously could never get this thing past the American people unless he lies about it.” So he lies.
They come to no such conclusion at all. In fact, they make no effort to come to any conclusions. They did their fact check, they reported it and the article ends there.
So, why is it whom is lying? I have no problem with you calling out Obama on questionable statements and over-simplifications. I certainly have no problem with your relying on the AP piece.
I have a very serious problem with your telling us that the writers of that piece came to the conclusion “that Obama obviously could never get this thing past the American people unless he lies about it.”
Do you think so little of your readers as to believe that no one would go and read the piece for themselves? You don’t get to call out liars by being one yourself.
All I can say is that Bush lied and people died, Obama lied and people get healthy. I’ll take Obama’s lies any day.
The irony is that Bush didn’t lie, but Obama is lying about rationing care and denying end of life care to seniors. And if people believe that lie and ObamaCare becomes law, people will literally die as a result. And nobody on the left seems to care about it.
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] unicorns will be here any minute. After the president’s Hail Mary speech on Wednesday, the AP did a fact check and found many of his claims to be a stretch, at best. For example, on the assurance that “it [...]