In a 30-minute interview filled with typical Fox Fluff, Sarah Palin managed to make a host of false statements on policy issues while talking with Fox News.
In a TV appearance that coincided with her ongoing bus tour, John McCain’s 2008 running mate demonstrated a lack of understanding about U.S. foreign aid, the Social Security system, President Obama’s stimulus package, the oil industry, and the national debt.
Wow. The only other national political figures that could match such a string of “misstatements” like that are former Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and soon-to-be GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann.
Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler analyzed the Palin interview and responded in detail about Palin’s faux pas.
The ex-governor claimed that Obama has doubled the national debt in the first two years of his presidency (no doubt, a claim she has heard over and over from her buddy, Sean Hannity). While it’s pretty difficult to defend Obama’s fiscal policies, the truth is that Obama inherited a $10 trillion debt and, in his first two years and five months in office, he added $4.3 trillion, Kessler noted – far less than a 100 percent increase.
On the subject of jobs and the economy, Palin claimed that a failed stimulus program led to “record-setting unemployment” under Obama. Again, it’s not easy to refute claims that the economy has been a mess under this administration. But, in reality, unemployment peaked at a higher rate under Ronald Reagan than under Obama, and it has been far lower than the record rate of more than 23 percent set in 1932 during the Great Depression.
But my favorite was when Drill Baby Drill Palin tried to cite facts and figures about oil production and apparently confused the entire world’s oil consumption rate with U.S. consumption. At least, that’s the only plausible explanation.
As a result, Kessler said, Palin claimed the U.S. lost $8 billion a day in revenues during the 2010 Gulf of Mexico deepwater oil drilling moratorium. The true figure was just $20 million a day.
Oops.
You can read the entire fact-check here.
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Palin’s “One Nation” bus tour stopped yesterday at the Boston home of Paul Revere and the former Alaska governor mangled history while within earshot of the mainstream media
Asked to expound on the importance of Revere’s famous ride to rouse the countryside from Boston to Lexington and Concord on the night of April 18, 1775, Palin nearly matched Michele Bachmann’s lack of historical knowledge.
Among other things, she said Revere warned the British and that bells and shots alerted the Middlesex farmers.As the folks at The Christian Science Monitor point out, Revere and others actually relied upon lights and shouting, as anybody who’s read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s classic poem on this subject knows.
To mark the occasion of Palin’s latest gaffe, the Christian Science Monitor’s politics blog came up with their own version of Longfellow:
Listen my children and you shall hear
Of Sarah Palin’s tale of Paul Revere.
On the second of June, in twenty-eleven,
She put pundits in TV heaven,
As far from the facts her words did veer.
Of Sarah Palin’s tale of Paul Revere.
On the second of June, in twenty-eleven,
She put pundits in TV heaven,
As far from the facts her words did veer.
She said to a crowd: He warned the British
They wouldn’t be takin’ our guns away.
He rang those bells lickity-splittish
As he rode his horse though town, hooray!
And he also sent out warning shots
To show that security, we’d have lots,
And that Americans were gonna be free,
As all of us armed we were gonna be,
One gun by land, and two if by sea!
They wouldn’t be takin’ our guns away.
He rang those bells lickity-splittish
As he rode his horse though town, hooray!
And he also sent out warning shots
To show that security, we’d have lots,
And that Americans were gonna be free,
As all of us armed we were gonna be,
One gun by land, and two if by sea!
