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PrintSeptember 27, 2008
Media Report card for the debate
The media is scoring this one as a win for Obama.
Boston Globe: "Good night for McCain, better one for Obama" is the headline for an article (owned by the New York Times). Ridiculous.
The Fact-Checking at the Boston Globe is manipulated and sorely deficient.
Boston Globe: "Good night for McCain, better one for Obama" is the headline for an article (owned by the New York Times). Ridiculous.
The Fact-Checking at the Boston Globe is manipulated and sorely deficient.
The paper did not even call out Obama for one of the more glaring fictions of the evening: his advocacy for negotiations with Iran without preconditions. The paper made a passing reference to Obama's misstatement of Kissinger's positions regarding negotiating with Iran; without pointing out that Kissinger felt that Obama was so manipulating the truth that Kissinger actually called people in the media last night to express his outrage over Obama's distortion of his positions.
The paper did not even mention Obama's lie on missile defense. Obama last night asserted that he supported missile defense-a glaring lie.
Obama said "no one is talking about losing in Iraq". As anyone following the news over the past few years can tell you, plenty of people are talking about losing in Iraq-mostly Democrat leaders (including Barack Obama) who have made a fetish about always repeating the mantra -we have lost Iraq (see Harry Reid, for example).
How about wind, solar, biodiesel-which Obama repeats as a mantra as a way out of our dependency on foreign sources of oil? These can only supply a small percentage of our needs and in some cases, it is arguable, are not efficient at all (biodiesel).
Obama said he has consistently called the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terror group. Wrong - he refused to so designate it by refusing to vote for the Kyl-Lieberman Resolution which expressly called that group a terror group. He then had the audacity to bludgeon his fellow Democratic aspirants for President (including Hillary Clinton) for supporting the measure.
Obama said "no one is talking about attacking Pakistan" (an Obama "tell" would be his use of the line "no one is talking about.."- it seems to invariably followed by a misstatement of fact).
This is a lie: Obama has talked about attacking Pakistan via terror targets within that nation . A matter of fact, Obama himself last night, less than two minutes after he said that line, talked about attacking Pakistan if the Pakistanis don't take tougher measures against terrorists within its borders.
Obama claims that Al Qaeda is stronger than it's been at any time since 2001. This last assertion is counter to recent analysis of Al Qaeda's strength, as pointed out by Jonathan Last at the Weekly Standard.
Obama said it was politically risky for him to oppose the war in Iraq. Ridiculous. He took that step when he was running for a state office from a hyper-liberal district in Illinois. He made that statement in front of an anti-war rally. Where is the political risk? He was no profile in courage in opposing the war given that context.
Obama touts the new energy bill in Congress as a way to reduce dependency on foreign oil-which is a national security/foreign policy issue. This "energy bill" is so riddled with self-destruct mechanisms that it is a nullity (offshore drilling has to be approved on a state by state basis-even though the states will get no share of revenue; drilling can only take place more than 50 miles away from the coast).
Obama talked about his role in halting earmarks. That is a bit of a fib. He only did so when he started his run for President (and he did not call for a complete ban-just for a temporary halt for further study). Prior to that political step, he requested one million dollars a day for earmarks during his time in the Senate.
This is not the worst financial crisis since the Depression as Obama asserts. We have not had two quarters of negative growth, for example. Our unemployment rates have been higher in the past-far higher. Our inflation rates have been far higher in the past. Hunger in America has been far higher in the past. Does Barack Obama even know about the past?
Does Obama support nuclear power as he asserts? McCain points out the roadblock Obama has placed by his efforts to derail the storage of nuclear waste as the Yucca depository-the only place available now to store anywhere near the amount of waste currently stored at the sites of nuclear power plants-an insecure solution and one that is rapidly becoming an unavailable one due to lack of capacity to store waste at those sites.
The Los Angeles Times likewise follows this approach: ignores major factual mistakes Obama made last night in order to help Obama's "scores" from last night.
This journalistic malpractice calls into question the intelligence of the journalists covering this campaign and the type of agenda-driven journalism that is leading to people increasingly finding the media biased.
This pattern-Obama deceptions or misstatement of facts are not covered by the media so many people accept them as facts. The reason Barack Obama refuses to have town hall meetings with John McCain (as he once agreed to do on the campaign trail) is that it allows informed people to take the measure of the man, unfiltered by a fawning press incapable or unwilling to reveal flaws
