"Misstatement of the Union"

I love FactCheck.org. I first learned about it when Dick Cheney cited it during the Vice Presidential debate in 2004 as a non-partisan web site which determined the veracity of various political claims.

(On two interesting side notes, Cheney accidentally referred to "FactCheck.com", a different site the owner of which forwarded all URL traffic to MoveOn.org so Cheney inadvertently ended up sending many people to MoveOn, but more importantly, FactCheck.org directly contradicted the very "fact" Cheney sent people there to confirm.)

If you get on their mailing list, you'll get dissections of false claims by both sides, they really are equal opportunity debunkers. When they take something on, you learn which talking points are true, which are true but misleading, and which are out and out false.

So their latest article deals with the State of the Union address, and it makes the following statements:

• He proudly spoke of "writing a new chapter in the story of self-government" in Iraq and Afghanistan and said the number of democracies in the world is growing. He failed to mention that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan yet qualify as democracies according to the very group whose statistics he cited.
• Bush called for Congress to pass a line-item veto, failing to mention that the Supreme Court struck down a line-item veto as unconstitutional in 1998. Bills now in Congress would propose a Constitutional amendment, but none have shown signs of life.
• The President said the economy gained 4.6 million jobs in the past two-and-a-half years, failing to note that it had lost 2.6 million jobs in his first two-and-a-half years in office. The net gain since Bush took office is just a little more than 2 million.
• He talked of cutting spending, but only "non-security discretionary spending." Actually, total federal spending has increased 42 percent since Bush took office.
• He spoke of being "on track" to cut the federal deficit in half by 2009. But the deficit is increasing this year, and according to the Congressional Budget Office it will decline by considerably less than half even if Bush's tax cuts are allowed to lapse.
• Bush spoke of a "goal" of cutting dependence on Middle Eastern oil, failing to mention that US dependence on imported oil and petroleum products increased substantially during his first five years in office, reaching 60 per cent of consumption last year.

You can read their detailed analysis here.

Liam.