Bush Lies More Than Kerry!

Of course, we already knew that, but here is an interesting
article to send to your Kool-Aid drinking friends.

See if you can knock some sense into them.

"BUSH LIES MORE THAN KERRY....FILM AT 11....Here's a poser: do both candidates rely on deceit and distortion equally? Debate fact checking articles don't usually take sides on this question, but ABC News Political Director Mark Halperin does, telling his reporters in an internal memo last week that "the current Bush attacks on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a way that goes beyond what Kerry has done."

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_10/004897.php

Liberal with distortions...
Liberal with tax cuts for the wealthy...
Liberal with loopholes for Oil Companies...

I went through the entire list....it's amazing the inability of this guy to really hone in on the most important issues.

Here's my favorites listed for Bush....

1. "We increased that child credit by $1,000, reduced the marriage penalty, created a 10 percent tax bracket for the lower-income Americans. That's right at the middle class. He voted against it."

Kerry didn't vote against this last month. He missed the vote. He did vote against the entire 2001 tax bill, but not because of those provisions, which he's clearly stated he's in favor of.

The intent is clearly to suggest that Kerry is opposed to these particular tax cuts, despite his consistent and longstanding statements to the contrary.

2. "We've already caught 75 percent of people."

The real figure is closer to two-thirds, and applies only to al-Qaeda leaders, not the entire organization, which has grown substantially since 9/11. What's more, of al-Qaeda's top leaders, virtually none have been captured.

There's certainly an intent on Bush's part to exaggerate his success at rolling up al-Qaeda, but the real figures are too ambiguous to say he's being flatly deceptive here. (What?$%$#@?)

3. "Another is to pass -- to get our seniors to sign up to these drug discount cards, and they're working."

Actually, there are a lot of problems with the drug discount cards. (Man is that an understatement)

Overall, this is fairly harmless and normal political puffery. (What?$%$#@?)

4. "Non-homeland, non-defense discretionary spending was raising at 15 percent a year when I got into office. And today it's less than 1 percent, because we're working together to try to bring this deficit under control."

This is true only by cherry-picking two specific years out of the past 12.

This was a very serious effort to deceive people into thinking he's been reducing spending. By nearly every possible measure, Bush has increased spending faster than any president for the past 30 years.
(OK...they got one right)

On Kerry's remarks...there's only one worth even talking about or which could be scored in this analysis

1. "The president gave the top 1 percent of income-earners in America, got $89 billion last year, more than the 80 percent of people who earn $100,000 or less all put together."

According to the Tax Policy Center, the top 1% got 24% of the total tax cut in 2004. The bottom 80% got 30% of the tax cut and those under $100K goes 42%. Kerry obviously got his numbers mixed up, but they're substantially wrong either way. (What???)

Can this guy get his facts straight himself?
Kerry said 80% of the people who earn $100,000 or less.
So even if we use fuzzy math to calculate what this means...
take .8 X 42% = .336 % then we're getting closer to the 24%...but this still doesn't account for the actual distribution OF THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE in each bracket. We would have to look at the breakout tables of who lies under 100K, AND THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHICH THIS REPRESENTS to get the exact figures.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/001376.html

See the graphic here and you can appreciate what Kerry is saying...
Let's assume for a moment that the 80% that Kerry is talking about represents the under 75K bar....then this would represent a total of 26% of the people.

The point here is that even though the article clearly showed Bush to be the winner in lying, the analysis was very much tilted against Kerry. They clearly didn't even do their homework to refute his statement on the tax cuts, which I bet would be found to be dead accurate in Kerry's favor.