Fact checking Republican presidential candidate speeches from the New Hampshire primary

Fact checking Republican presidential candidate speeches from the New Hampshire primary

Posted on January 11th, 2012 by Ricky Sprague

This election season is arguably the most important, and most recent, in history. I have noticed that a lot of statements are being made by the presidential candidates. A lot of these statements are indisputably unfactual, and I know this because I am a fact checker.

Today, more than ever, with candidates making more and more statements, the role of a fact checker such as myself is undeniable. For instance, when a candidate makes a statement, I will fact-check it. I am taking on this monumental task myself and lucky for you that I am, because these candidates are really saying things.

I take this important role seriously. I will offer unbiased, unpartisan fact checking. All I am looking for is facts to check, and when I find them, I will check them. Without bias, because an informed electorate is arguably an important thing. So I will begin by fact checking statements made by Republican presidential candidates in their New Hampshire primary speeches last night.

First, I will fact check the winner of the New Hampshire primary, Mutt Mittens Romney. In his speech, Mr. Romney, a flip-flopper who ties dogs to the tops of cars and then drives them around for about twelve hours, stated,

Today, we are faced with the disappointing record of a failed President. The last three years have held a lot of change, but they haven’t offered much hope.

In these sentences Mr. Romney states that President Obama is a “failed” president. In fact, the President has an impressive list of accomplishments, as this article in the award-winning Onion points out:

“Let’s list the pros and cons of being president. … Con: You can help 40 million Americans receive health care, sign legislation that regulates a financial system run amok, give the order to kill Osama bin Laden, help topple Muammar Qaddafi’s tyrannical regime without losing the life of one American soldier, end the war in Iraq, repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, stave off a second Great Depression, take out more than 30 top al- Qaeda leaders, and somehow everyone still calls you the next Jimmy Carter.”

Given everything that the President has accomplished, describing him as “failed” strains the definition of that word, which is defined by the nonpartisan Merriam-Webster dictionary as,

transitive verb
1 a: to disappoint the expectations or trust of
b: to miss performing an expected service or function for
2: to be deficient in : lack
3: to leave undone : neglect
4 a: to be unsuccessful in passing
b: to grade (as a student) as not passing

The only one of those definitions that might fit the President would be “to leave undone,” and, while I doubt that Mr. Romney actually meant to suggest that the President needed a second term to finish everything he needs to accomplish, many have suggested that Mr. Obama needs two terms to fully restore our country to greatness, especially considering the fact that the Republicans have done so much to try and stop him in his first term. As one poster on the nonpartisan AARP’s website notes,

What makes even these accomplishments look better is that the Republican party has done everything in their power to stifle and obstruct whatever the president has proposed. The health care reform act and stimulus bill received no Republican votes. The Republicans in congress almost brought this country to the brink of default and almost brought another government shut down. How many other presidents have faced an opposition party where one of their leaders said their major priority was to make sure that the president was a one term president?
I am sure that there are other accomplishments as well as major disappointments since Obama took office in January 2009. But when one considers where the country was in January 2009 and what we were facing back then, a lot has been accomplished.

Therefore, I am rating this particular statement, DISFACTUAL.

Mr. Romney’s next statement up for fact check is:

Our debt is too high and our opportunities too few.

Many people have suggested that our debt is “too high.” That has become a mantra among reactionaries, which is why it’s important for a dispassionate person with no ideological axe to grind such as myself to fact check it. And the suggestion that “our debt is too high” might be popular, but only among the functionally illiterate. As the Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman has pointed out,

Governments don’t [have to pay back their debt] – all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

Second – and this is the point almost nobody seems to get – an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.

As long as we continue to grow our tax base, our debt can never be “too high.” The fact that unemployment dropped in December shows that our tax base is growing:

The unemployment rate in the United States in December fell to 8.5 percent, its lowest level in nearly three years, the U.S. Labor Department (DOL) announced on Friday.

According to the December 2011 Employment Situation Report, nonfarm payroll employment added about 200,000 jobs, pushing the private sector up. The DOL said almost 2 million jobs were created in 2011.

That shows that, despite the opposition to progress that the Republicans have exhibited, our tax base is growing, which means our deficits aren’t worthy of focus. And as our employment grows, so do our opportunities.

I am rating this statement UNFACTLIKE.

The next of Mr. Romney’s fact statements which I will fact check is as follows:

And this President wakes up every morning, looks out across America and is proud to announce, “It could be worse.”

There is absolutely no way that Mr. Romney could possibly know what the President “announces” when he wakes up every morning, unless he is illegally wiretapping the President’s bedroom. However, we don’t know for certain that the President doesn’t announce “It could be worse” when he wakes up in the morning. For that reason, I am rating this statement LIKELY DUBIOUS AND UNTRUSTWORTHY.

Mr. Romney’s next statement:

The President has run out of ideas.

Clearly, this is nonsense. The President has several ideas. As the Washington Post, a newspaper, said in reference to a speech the President gave in December,

Obama called for a return to modest, middle-class values and said the recent rise in populist anger — from the tea party movement to the Occupy Wall Street protests — was evidence of the need to remedy the growing economic inequality in American life.

That is two ideas right there — a return to middle class values, and a need to remedy economic inequality. Anyone who suggests that the President doesn’t have ideas needs to more fully listen to the President’s speeches, because his ideas are clearly right there out in the open for anyone with ears to see. Mr. Romney’s statement is UNGENUINE.

His next statement for my unbiased fact-checking eye:

When it comes to the economy, my highest priority as President will be worrying about your job, not saving my own.

While we cannot see into the future, especially not a future that occurs in an alternate universe where President Obama, the best President of all time, doesn’t get re-elected to see what a so-called “President Romney” would prioritize, we can look to Mr. Romney’s past to see what his priorities are. And his priorities are not with “worrying about your job.” In fact, Mr. Romney himself recently stated,

I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.

Clearly, Mr. Romney prioritizes firing people who provide him with “services,” (perhaps the word “services” refers to those of a sexual variety, such as provided by prostitutes? I can’t verify at this time whether or not Mr. Romney likes to fire prostitutes or not, but I will keep fact-checking until I can) which suggests that Mr. Romney hardly prioritizes jobs for others. Even one of his own fellow Repugnantcans Republicans Jon Huntsman has suggested that Mr. Romney is a prostitute-firing jerk:

“It’s become abundantly clear over the last couple days what differentiates Gov. Romney and me,” Huntsman said. “I will always put my country first. It seems Gov. Romney believes in putting politics first. Gov. Romney enjoys firing people, I enjoy creating jobs.”

Mr. Romney often touts his private-sector experience with Bain Capital investments as evidence of his ability to create jobs. But, as the Administrator at the Thom Hartmann Radio Show message board has stated,

The guy made a living laying off working Americans – and now he thinks he’d be the best guy to create jobs. Good luck making that argument in a general election.

Mr. Romney puts politics first, and he lays off Americans so that he can reap all the benefits for himself. Therefore, I have to rate Mr. Romney’s “I will prioritize your jobs over my own” statement as FACT-IMPAIRED.

Now let us move over to Ron Paul’s acceptance speech. Mr. Paul came in second place in New Hampshire. I’m not sure why the guy who comes in second place is making an acceptance speech after failing to win, but that is not my problem. My problem is to fact check these liars, which is what I’m doing, with an unbiased look at what they’re saying. And one thing that Mr. Paul said that I checked was,

I think what we need to do is make this emphasis that liberty means you have a right to your life and your privacy and the way you want to live your life, as long as you don’t hurt people, and you have a right to keep and spend your money as you want to.

These sentences are so absurd that it’s difficult to take them seriously enough to fact-check them. Mr. Paul’s statement is contradicted even by mainstream conservative thinkers such as the New York Times‘s conservative columnist David Brooks, who stated in a column published earlier this month,

[A] nation isn’t just an agglomeration of individuals; it’s a fabric of social relationships.
…
Communities breed character. … [G]overnment cannot be agnostic about the character of its citizens because the less disciplined the people are, the more government must step in to provide order.

Ironically, liberty breeds less liberty, because as people practice liberty, they must be protected from the bad choices they make which damage their lives and therefore cost all of us. By way of example, our government is leading the charge against distracted driving which is, according to the federal government’s own website,

a dangerous epidemic on America’s roadways. In 2009 alone, nearly 5,500 people were killed and 450,000 more were injured in distracted driving crashes.

The U.S. Department of Transportation is leading the effort to stop texting and cell phone use behind the wheel. Since 2009, we have held two national distracted driving summits, banned texting and cell phone use for commercial drivers, encouraged states to adopt tough laws, and launched several campaigns to raise public awareness about the issue.

The idea that American citizens have “a right to your life and privacy” is obviously UNMOORED FROM TRUTH, a fact which Mr. Paul himself seems to acknowledge within the statements quoted above. You’ll note that Mr. Paul also says, “as long as you don’t hurt people.” But that is why government must make laws that Mr. Paul claims are against his “liberty.” Because things like distracted driving kill thousands of people every year. For that reason, I am rating half of Mr. Paul’s statement ACCIDENTALLY STUMBLING INTO SOMETHING NEARING VERACITY.

Mr. Paul’s next statement up for fact checking:

You don’t have to compromise.

The idea that people shouldn’t compromise has been debunked by years of experience. In fact, as Walter Isaacson pointed out in a bipartisan article in the newspaper The New York Times, our country was founded on compromise:

We like to think of our nation’s founders as men with unwavering fealty to high-minded principles. To some extent they were. But when they gathered in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 to write the Constitution, they showed that they were also something just as great and often more difficult to be: compromisers. In that regard they reflected not just the classical virtues of honor and integrity but also the Enlightenment’s values of balance, order, tolerance, scientific calibration and respect for other people’s beliefs. On almost all issues that they faced — with one very big exception — this art of compromise served them well. As Benjamin Franklin, that ultimate Enlightenment sage, conveyed in both his actions and words at the convention, compromisers may not make great heroes but they do make great democracies.

In truth, Mr. Paul’s statement is completely and utterly wrong — you do have to compromise. That’s how greatness is achieved. I am rating Mr. Paul’s statement WHOLLY CONTRADICTED BY THE INDISPUTABLE FACTS.

Mr. Paul’s next fact checked statement:

What we have to convince them, if you are a true humanitarian, you have to fight and argue the case for free markets, sound money, property rights, contract rights, no use of force, and a sensible foreign policy, so we don’t waste our resources.

Mr. Paul is suggesting here that only true humanitarians are in favor of free markets. This is so obviously false that everyone knows it. Unfettered capitalism is what almost destroyed our economy, and has led to our current economic woes. But just to be sure, I went downstairs to talk to one of my neighbors, Jim. Jim is so non-partisan that he’s not even registered to vote, because that’s how they get your name for jury duty. I asked him if it was unfettered capitalism that caused the recent recession, or if he thought that humanitarians are opposed to the government. He told me:

Obviously, capitalistic greed and deregulation caused the recession. And no one’s even gone to jail for it. Where is MY bailout?

As for “no use of force,” I suppose Mr. Paul wants to get rid of the police. I asked my downstairs neighbor Jim about that one, too. He laughed. Then he said,

Sure, we can get rid of the police. Then everyone will be killing each other in the street, and raping their corpses.

Facts are stubborn things. I am ranking Mr. Paul’s lies as POTENTIALLY CORPSE-RAPING UNTRUTHS.

Well, there were some other candidates who appeared on the ballot in New Hampshire as well. They probably made some speeches, but they all said the same things, basically. And all of the things they said were mostly untruths. That is why I must diligently fact check all of their lies, or as many as I can get to before I have to go to sleep. It’s pretty clear that these people will say anything to get the President’s job; but they haven’t reckoned on me, and my unbiased fact checking abilities.

Written after reading this Columbia Journalism Review piece, via the Agitator.

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Ricky Sprague

Ricky Sprague occasionally writes and/or draws things. He sometimes animates things. He has a Twitter account and he has a blog. He scripted this graphic novel about Kolchak The Night Stalker. He is really, really good at putting links in bios.