Checking the Checkers: Clinton Speech
The AP carried the DNC's water when "fact checking" the Trump speech, basically twisting 11 true (or mostly true) things into looking like he was lying, then ignoring 43 other true facts, to keep their ratios down: Checking the Checkers: Clinton vs Trump speeches
So of course you expect they'd treat Hillary Clinton the same way, and measure her by the same yardstick? Don't be absurd. The AP doesn't stand for the Administration's Press for nothing. They are to Journalism what Michael Moore was to Documentary Film Making: slovenly, hypocrtical, obnoxious propagandists. ABC news, Yahoo and a few others ran the AP piece, which means they agree (or were too lazy to vet the material before publishing).
Contents
Facts they checked
(1) Soft : [Hillary] wrongly implied Donald Trump has proposed banning Islam in America
- "wrongly implied"? That's code for flat out lied and misrepresented what Trump said. Then they go on, to bash Trump in a Hillary checking article to say, "For his part, Trump spun a story...", this isn't about Trump. They didn't mention Hillary's many lies in the Trump, "fact check". So trying with platitudes and distractions to let Hillary off the hook.
(2) Huh? : "I've laid out my strategy for defeating ISIS".
- The AP admits they can't tell the difference between this and the "Obama's strategy", and if there's a strategy, neither knows what one is, or hasn't shared it. What kind of strategy is, "We will strike their sanctuaries from the air, and support local forces taking them out on the ground. We will surge our intelligence so that we detect and prevent attacks before they happen. We will disrupt their efforts online to reach and radicalize young people in our country." Those are tactics, not strategy. And how does it differ from Obama, or offer any details that you could call a strategy? And that's really the best fact you could check?
(3) False : "Bernie Sanders and I will work together to make college tuition-free for the middle class and debt-free for all.".
- The facts are, her plan only covers families that make below $125K (which isn't middle class in some cities, and is upper-middle in others), as usual, dumb one-size-fits-all stupidity that the AP doesn't question. But covering tuition isn't making it "debt free", as room, board, books, transportation, etc., all pile on the debt as well. The fact checkers would all say this was at least half wrong because of "debt free". The AP points some of this out, softly. But doesn't check it clearly as "false". (And while we know she won't actually get this passed, we can't prove that until after the fact).
(4) Huh? : "In my first 100 days, we will work with both parties to pass the biggest investment in new, good-paying jobs since World War II."
- The AP keeps checking campaign promises, and ignoring the facts she claimed. They admit this claim is wrong, as the scale of her program is 1/3rd Obama's size -- so at least they rightly softly inferred this is a steaming pile of bullshit, if she could get it passed (which she won't), and if government stimulus ever worked (which is never has), but it's a bit of a softball.
(5) Misleading' : "We will not ban a religion".
- AP correctly points out the inference here is that Trump would ban a religion, and they focus on Trump's claims, instead of Hillary's lies. So half credit. They reported the point, that Trump didn't say what Hillary is implying he said. But they focus on Trump instead of Hillary. This is misleading.
(6) WTF? : They talk about Trump in the middle of the Hillary Fact check? Focus people.
- This article is messed up.
(7) False : on taxing the wealthy and corporations: "Because when more than 90 percent of the gains have gone to the top 1 percent, that's where the money is."...
- The AP soft-peddles it with, "While vague, Clinton's claim probably relies on outdated figures and exaggerates inequality", they make excuses for where that might have came from: the long discredited Saez's exaggerated income inequality stuff (that is still only around 50%). It's not your job as fact checkers to do logic gymnastics to rationalize a bad source for a candidate's stupidity, and they wouldn't do that for Trump. Explain where it's wrong, even if there is a moronic source mis-claiming it's true. Just call it wrong.
- Income inequality, vanishing middle class, and other scams
(8) True'ish : "In Atlantic City, 60 miles from here, you'll find contractors and small businesses who lost everything because Donald Trump refused to pay his bills. People who did the work and needed the money, and didn't get it - not because he couldn't pay them, but because he wouldn't pay them."...
- They admit that this is a reference to a an early 1990's Taj Mahal Casino failure, and when Trump went bankrupt (so didn't have the money to pay them, unlike what Hillary claims). Trump has created 515 business ventures, 7 have gone bankrupt: that's a >97% success rate, if the fact checkers wanted to give people context: they don't. They forgot to mention if we're going back to that era that Hillary's Whitewater land deals bankrupted many more people as well. But I forgot, they aren't fact checking Hillary, just Trump.
(9) False : Video, "She could have joined a big law firm, been a corporate bigwig. Instead she chose the Children's Defense Fund."...
- Instead of just saying the truth, that this is a big lie/distortion, and she failed the D.C. bar, that it's not quite the whole truth. Plus she did start working at Rose Law Firm, that later went down in scandal and greed, they soft-peddle it. She did volunteer with some kids initiatives, and her great poverty contribution was defending Black Panthers who had tortured and killed a federal agent, interned with Robert Treuhaft (Communist), and wrote papers on her mentor Saul Alinsky (a vile human being).
- http://www.bahaistudies.net/neurelitism/library/alinsky_interview_1967.pdf
(10) WTF: "Donald Trump says he wants to make America great again - well, he could start by actually making things in America again"
- The AP keeps dodging facts, and checking slogans or Trump? "Trump has regularly sourced his branded products from overseas... while criticizing Apple/etc. for doing the same". This is biased if it were a Trump hypocrisy check as many/most of Trumps products ARE made in America (the fact that some are abroad needs context of how many). But this was supposed to be a Hillary fact check, not a Trump one. We need to see if Hillary has done the same. Oh wait, she and the DNC have been caught doing the same things? She made a deal to sell U.S. Uranium interests to Russia while Sec State, after they gave her generous donations, or the TPP that she supports would increase offshoring? They could have easily pointed out that Hillary is as guilty (more so) than Trump in this regards to offer some counter-balance to what she’s saying, it is a Hillary fact check. But the AP doesn't have journalists, they have Hillary Campaign volunteers.
After that, it's all Trump, correcting 6 other Trump points, with nothing to do with Hillary. So a fact check of Hillary, rarely touches facts, and spends 8 of 16 points (or more) on Trump, and Hillary isn't really fact checked, more defended and they reiterated campaign promises. If the AP had any journalists on staff any more, they'd be really embarrassed.
Facts that they didn't check
- "America is stronger because of President Obama’s leadership, and I’m better because of his friendship". - Both "American is stronger" and "friendship" are stretches.
- "I want to thank Bernie Sanders..". - yeah, for being screwed by how the DNC corrupted the primary process, and called me a liar, and so on. Sincere thanks, I'm sure.
- "The revolutionary war happened because they began listening to each other … compromising … finding common purpose.... by the time they left Philadelphia, they had begun to see themselves as one nation". - This is sort of a fictionalization of what happened in our countries founding, we were 13 colonies, not one nation, and they didn't compromise, they agreed to tolerate each others uniqueness (and codify that into the 10th amendment). So her delusions about what happened, and failing to know the basics of American history isn't a shock. But Historians might disagree with the points she made.
- "[Donald Trump] wants to divide us — from the rest of the world, and from each other" -- bullshit. No more than Democrats with rich/poor, CEO's and workers, bankers and everyone else, students and taxpayers, black and white, cops and blacks, and so on. The Democrats are the party of divide and conquer. .
- "[Donald Trump] wants us to fear the future and fear each other" -- bullshit. It's the dems that have been saying that we should fear Donald with the bomb, or spreading lies about working with The Russians, and so on. Or what will happen if they're not elected. So anyone with integrity would say accusing the other side of being a fear monger, is fear mongering. At best it's loosely equal, and worst, it's pure hypocrisy and projection. She rants in this speech about why we should fear Trump, while accusing him of being divisive. Pick a standard for both sides.
- "a great Democratic President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, came up with the perfect rebuke to Trump more than eighty years ago" -- that had nothing to do with Trump. And it wasn't about a politician, it was about the great depression and accepting FDR's hope and change, which like Obama's, only made things worse and extended the depression by years.
- "Instead, we will build an economy where everyone who wants a good paying job can get one" -- no we won't. Human nature says that there are going to be stupid and incompetent people that want a good paying job and can't get one. Ex felons that will have tough times getting work, and so on. There's always going to be hardship and losers in life. Sorry, it sucks, but don't lie to the people about it, even if your base is stupid/gullible enough to believe it. If she stated we should strive towards it (or less of it), that's truth. Saying we will build is false, we all know she won't. Even if she wanted to.
- "we’ll build a path to citizenship for millions of [illegal] immigrants who are already contributing to our economy" -- and costing us even more. I like immigrants, I want more. But the math is that poor people cost more in social services than they benefit -- that's what "income redistribution" means. You can't be for "wealth redistribution" and claim that the poor are contributing more than they cost -- those are mutually exclusive. They're net burdens on services and society, because that's how Democrats take more from some people. So first you have to admit that the poor are net costs and net burdens, then we can balance how much burden we can/should take. Pretending they contribute more than they cost is a fraud (something she's good at).
- "There’s too much inequality. Too little social mobility. Too much paralysis in Washington", says who? What kind of inequality? (We have the most redistributive tax code in the world, the fact that some are succeeding in spite of it, isn't bad). Who are politicians to "fix it"? More a lie of omission than lie. But still not a truth. If the choice is marching to your doom, or doing nothing (paralysis) which is better? To about half of Americans paralysis was better than more Obamanomics, or Hillaryanomics.
- "We have the most tolerant and generous young people we’ve ever had" -- I want to see some evidence of that. The fact that they want things like "Free College" is proof to the contrary.
- "We have the most powerful military" - despite the Democrats attempts to gut it
- "The most innovative entrepreneurs" -- the least of them we've had in our history, suffocated out by Democrat policies.
- 'And most of all, don’t believe anyone who says: “I alone can fix it."' -- he didn't say that. Or actually, he did, but the context wasn't what she implies: he was talking relative to the other candidate(s) (her), not the nation. (He had clarified that point later). Also in the speech, he’d talked about working with Law Enforcement and Military and others, and she ignored that part. So taking someone out of context is a deception.
- She doubles down on the lie, talking about cops, military, nurses, teachers and so on, "He’s forgetting every last one of us". Nope, he mentioned them. Spending a lot of time spinning her deception. Either she's stupid to not know the context, or she's a lying bitch willing to wasn't a lot of time on lying about what the other side believes, because it distracts and filibusters and prevents her having to say anything material (which the speech does very little). This whole section turned me off to her.
- "Our Founders fought a revolution and wrote a Constitution so America would never be a nation where one person had all the power" -- they did. But it's the left that wants to pool more power in the fed than the right, and even Trump. So this whole spin is misleading.
- "Where you can... send your kids to a good school, no matter what ZIP code you live in." -- that's why Democrats have blocked school choice, and letting parents send their kids to a good school no matter what ZIP code they live in? Dems oppose the very thing they say they advocate. Talk about double-dealing.
- "But my job titles only tell you what I’ve done" -- no they don't. A title means nothing, it's symbolism. Your accomplishments would tell us what you've done. But most of those have been scandals, lies and cheating. So if you have no real accomplishments, you rely on titles.
- "So we gathered facts. We built a coalition. And our work helped convince Congress to ensure access to education for all students with disabilities. Every kid with a disability has the right to go to school". -- a bit of gymnastics. In 1974, the Children's Defense Fund wrote a paper on why kids with disabilities weren't in public school. Hillary was one of around 250 named contributors to that report. The U.S. Dept of Education credits Section 504 to either 1973 OCR (a year before the report), or the 1990, and 2008 ADA acts (which she had nothing to do with). She appears to have had as much to do with the outcome, as I did with breaking up the Beatles. [1]
- "and kept me working with leaders of both parties to help create the Children’s Health Insurance Program that covers 8 million kids every year" - Ted Kennedy (D) and Orrin Hatch (R) did that. As the Boston Globe put it, "[Hillary] had little to do with crafting the landmark legislation or ushering it through Congress, according to several lawmakers, staffers, and healthcare advocates involved in the issue." Yes, Hillary was a minor lobbyist in this, that the Press will over-credit her, but she wasn't persuading the Republicans who despised her and held the majority in Senate and House -- that was Hatch and the Republicans. She only had to help Teddy Kennedy with the democrat minority side of the house. Her efforts weren't bipartisan and it was the Republicans that gave us that program -- if Republicans hadn't of been for it, it would have never passed. She tries to give Democrats (minority party) credit, and herself as one small voice in the Democrat minority credit for driving it. A stretch of a stretch. [2]
- "Tonight, we’ve reached a milestone in our nation’s march toward a more perfect union: the first time that a major party has nominated a woman for President." -- a deception... the first time a MAJOR party, this lets her dodge that other parties have done it first.
- "Our economy is so much stronger than when they took office" -- not really. We can argue this one back and forth. There are many cases like debt, deficit, job starts, work participation, number of underemployed, trade deficits, future obligations/liabilities, and so on, where we're way, way worse off. We can't fix the problem if dimwits and frauds can't admit there are problems.
- 15 million new private-sector jobs - false. This only counts if you start in 2010 and not when he took office. If you start when he took office it’s about 10M jobs (a little over 1.1M jobs/year). Before he took office and dems took congress (2003-2007), we generally added about 2M jobs per year added to the roles (instead of 1.1M). So this lie of omission could be worded more accurately as "job growth halved since he took office". We can argue whether that was all/mostly his fault: I would only partly blame his policies myself (not even mostly). But she’s trying to credit him, and only him, with creating those jobs, when the truth is the job growth rate went way down under his tenure (and often didn’t keep up with population growth). e.g. lying bitch.
- Twenty million more Americans with health insurance. - totally misleading bullshit. After the 2007-2009 recession, uninsured had peaked. This was going to come down with or without ACA. Most of the new covered is because they became unemployed, retired, went on disability and are covered under medicare/medicaid. This would have happened without ACA. Non elderly uninsured has floated between 16-17% before Obama. After Obama it went up to 18% and has come back down to 16.7% : http://kff.org/uninsured/fact-sheet/key-facts-about-the-uninsured-population/
- "the auto industry had its best year ever” — um no. Sales are up, profits and marketshare aren’t close to peak. And much of those sales are foreign autos not American ones.
- "[Create jobs] From our inner cities to our small towns, from Indian Country to Coal Country" -- Coal Country? Really? It's been Obamanomics and Hillary's green energy claims that's been hurting Coal Country. She's voted against things that would help them, and for things that would hurt/destroy them. You can't slip an industry you've tried to destroy in and pretend that you care without getting called on it.
- "That’s why we need to appoint Supreme Court justices who will get money out of politics and expand voting rights, not restrict them. And we’ll pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United" -- reversing CU doesn't expand voting rights and free expression it limits it (and the first amendment). Everything the left believe on CU is based on ignorance or a lie: Corporate Personhood & Citizens United
- "It’s wrong to take tax breaks with one hand and give out pink slips with the other" -- no it isn't. What a moron. Imagine you're going bankrupt (losing jobs), you have to cut jobs, or go out of business. Should you cut 5% and take a 5% tax break, or cut 20% or 100% and not take them. Tax breaks are entitlements, you're entitled to them, you get to take them, whether you have to cut jobs or grow them. No one on the left will call her on that stupity, but these two things are NOT correlated.
- "I believe Wall Street can never, ever be allowed to wreck Main Street again." -- they didn't last time you simpleton. It was congress and overregulation that did that - Financial crisis of 2007-2008
- "I believe in science. I believe that climate change is real and that we can save our planet while creating millions of good-paying clean energy jobs." Those are mutually exclusive. The evidence is that the IPCC is wrong, and a model is not science, it's a religion. And you can't do both -- increasing the cost of energy will cost more jobs that in helps, it's science (economics) -- if you take money out of a system, you have less money. And paying more for the same thing, is taking money out.
- "I believe that when we have millions of hardworking immigrants contributing to our economy, it would be self-defeating and inhumane to kick them out." -- lie of context. Not all illegal immigrants are hardworking. No one wants to kick out the hard-working ones, but the criminals, gang-bangers, and ones burdening out economy, they do.
- "If you believe the minimum wage should be a living wage … and no one working full time should have to raise their children in poverty" - lie of omission. Only like 3% of poor are full time minimum wage workers. If you want to help poor, there's much better ways to do it than a moronic federal minimum wage.
- "If you believe that every man, woman, and child in America has the right to affordable health care" -- you can't have a right, to make someone else a slave (make someone else pay for something). It's not a right, it might be something we do -- but to be a right you have to be able to get it, and make someone else pay for it. That's slavery, not liberty.
- "If you believe that we should say “no” to unfair trade deals … that we should stand up to China" -- the opposite of the TPP that Hillary supported?
- "If you believe we should expand Social Security and protect a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions" -- huh? Why can't she? Where in SS does it say that a Woman can not?
- "if you believe that your working mother, wife, sister, or daughter deserves equal pay" -- this has been gone over, they already have that. The lie is the 77% myth.
- "[Donald] spoke for 70-odd minutes... And he offered zero solutions" -- false. He offered as many tangibles (if not more) than Hillary. Opposing Sanctuary cities would give them more money, opposing the TPP, reducing regulations to increase jobs, reducing illegal immigration, enforcing our laws to reduce crime, decreasing taxes to increase investment, and so on. She may not like the solution, but saying he didn't offer one, is a falsehood.
- "If we invest in infrastructure now, we’ll not only create jobs today, but lay the foundation for the jobs of the future" -- that's what Obama said with Porkulus, only like 5% of the spending ever got to infrastructure -- which meant the 95% burden, far outweighed the 5% gain, and we lost more jobs than we gained because of it. Our jobs only really started growing, once that spending was over and capped by a Republican congress that wouldn't allow new spending to go in and burden businesses more.
- "We will also liberate millions of people who already have student debt" -- it doesn't liberate them from it, it passes their debt back to them and others through taxes. But that debt is still owed and still has to be paid. You're just maki"ng others pay the costs.
- "We’re going to give small businesses a boost. Make it easier to get credit. Way too many dreams die in the parking lots of banks" -- Democrats lowering the loaning standards created the real-estate bubble. Now they want to lower the business loan standards, and leave taxpayers with that liability. Not a lie that she wants to ruin taxpayers in this way, but a lie of context that many bad dreams should die, if they're going to lose money anyways. (Not all credit is good credit... and who knows more about good credit, those making the loans, or politicians in DC?).
- "In America, if you can dream it, you should be able to build it." -- I imagine a robot with a truth detector and hooked up to the Internet, that will assassinate all lying politicians. I dreamed it, should I really be able to build it?
- "fighting for affordable child care and paid family leave is playing the “woman card,” then Deal Me In!" -- Oh goody. Maybe we can achieve the 40% unemployment rate for women of childbearing age that places like France or Italy have because of these costly benefits. (Nothing comes without a cost).
- "Wall Street, corporations, and the super rich are going to start paying their fair share of taxes" -- they already pay more than the rest of us.
- "if companies take tax breaks and then ship jobs overseas, we’ll make them pay us back" -- then they'll ship their corporate headquarters and more jobs overseas, and you'll end up with less tax revenue than you started with, meaning they aren't paying their fair share to us.
- "How are you going to break through the gridlock in Washington? Look at my record. I’ve worked across the aisle to pass laws and treaties and to launch new programs that help millions of people." -- name one. No one on her campaign has been able to name the legislative accomplishments she created.
- "From Baghdad and Kabul, to Nice and Paris and Brussels, to San Bernardino and Orlando, we’re dealing with determined enemies that must be defeated" -- Repeat after me, "ISLAMIC TERRORISTS". That's what they had in common. If you can't say it, how can we believe you can address it?
- "I’m proud that we put a lid on Iran’s nuclear program without firing a single shot" -- there's no lid on it. There was a slight delay, and giving them money and access to goods to fund it. And terms expire in a few years, making it more inevitable than ever. At best, you could claim you might have slightly delayed it, if you believe that the Iranians won't cheat (after getting caught cheating about 40 times in the past).
- "I’m proud that we shaped a global climate agreement — now we have to hold every country accountable to their commitments, including ourselves." -- words mean things. It's not an agreement, if people didn't agree to it, including ourselves. It's a list of things you want, but that's not an agreement until agreed to. Duh!
- "[Donald] thinks that he knows more than our military because he claimed our armed forces are “a disaster.”' -- he didn't say that he knows more than the military. In prior interviews he responded to the state of the military and said it was “depleted” or once said [it’s readiness] was “a disaster”, context was not that our military are idiots that he knows more than them, but that they don’t have the supplies and support they need. This is deceptive at best.
- "Donald Trump can’t even handle the rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign", says who? Latest polls have him beating her. Lie.
- "A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons." -- so if I show many bad tweets that Hillary's camp responded to, it means she shouldn't have access to nuclear weapons? She's equivocating angry words with destroying the earth, then dodges her own bad actions in the past. Pick a standard, but if saying stupid things is criminal, then Hillary needs to be in a padded cell.
- "She said that what worried President Kennedy during that very dangerous time was that a war might be started — not by big men with self-control and restraint, but by little men — the ones moved by fear and pride" -- and JFK was one of the little men moved by fear and pride. Fortunately, Khrushchev was the bigger man, unlike the egomaniacal democrat.
- "I’m not here to repeal the Second Amendment" -- liar. She wants to change it into something it was not. She's said so.
- "You heard, you saw, family members of people killed by gun violence" -- nope. We say 6 mothers of thugs that had their sons killed due to their bad parenting, their kids bad decisions, and repeated violations of the law.
- "You heard, you saw, family members of police officers killed in the line of duty..." -- only because the Republicans/press shamed the DNC into adding them to the docket last minute, because of the bias they were showing.
- "because they were outgunned by criminals".... they were not. Show a single case where any of the cops were gunned down by superior firepower than our militarized police force has. Liar.
- "let’s put ourselves in the shoes of young black and Latino men and women who face the effects of systemic racism" -- liar. If there's systemic racism show it, and explain why Democrats didn't address it after owning the White House for 8 years, and Congress/Senate for 2 years before that? Show the systemic racism! NOW!
- "like when Trump called women “pigs.”' -- fraud. He called a woman a pig. And Rosie O'Donnel is a nasty foul human that insulted/attacked him first, before he called her that back.
- "Or said that an American judge couldn’t be fair because of his Mexican heritage" -- he didn't say that. It's a media construct. He said that the judge was being unfair, and it was probably because he was an advocate for latino causes. That's kind of different.
- "Or when he mocks and mimics a reporter with a disability." -- debunked falsehood. Trump went after a reporter who has made false statements and never had a public retraction. The reporter had a muscular disorder that made some of Trump's gestures look like mocking, but Trump never knew the guy or of the disorder.
- "Or insults prisoners of war like John McCain" -- McCain went after Trump first. Just because you're a vet or a prisoner of war, does not exclude you for life from people going back after you, which is what Hillary is implying.
Truths
- "Comprehensive immigration reform will grow our economy and keep families together" -- probably not her vision of it, but at least this one has a foundation of truth.
Conclusion
So the total score is something like 59 lies that the AP didn't touch. 8 of 16 points in reviewing Hillary were about Trump and they attacked Trump instead.. The other 8 they picked were a few lies, and few things that were campaign promises or distractions. I saw 1 fairly true thing Hillary said (there are degrees of truth in many others).
The point isn't that politicians don't spin, or there wasn't grains of truth in many things she said -- there was enough for plausible deniability in most. But Fact checkers play, "mostly true" for Democrats, and "mostly false" for things with more truth to them for Republicans, most of the time. And that's what I'm pointing out. I can easily pick nits on Hillary, in was the Democrat Fact Checkers do against Republicans. So the problem isn't these nits, it's the double standard.
I don't really care that Hillary is the biggest liar and crooked criminal to achieve the nomination (that's for a different article), and it's for voters to decide. The point of this is did the AP do a fair job of "fact checking" Hillary versus Donald? A: Not even close.
Trump is an obnoxiously bombast, but Hillary is a liar. The fact that they could only find 8 lies in one that I found 4 dozen without even trying, says either the AP has no competent journalists, or no unbiased ones (that could get past their editorial review). And that says all we need to know about the AP.
Addendum
You can contrast this to the same job the fact checkers did towards Trump at:
And if you want to see Hillary's revisionism (by Bill) on her history, you can watch this:
- http://clashdaily.com/2016/07/viral-3mil-watched-brutal-analysis-bills-bs-dnc-wicked/ - Dick Morris eviscerates Bill and HIllary's claims about her background.
And for a scorecard of how the networks treated each candidate, there MRC/Newsbusters:
Written 2016.07.29 |