It’s a shame when those who claim to be “Fact Checking” resort to willful misinterpretations, distortions, and exaggerations of their own.
For example this Fact Checker from The Washington Post starts with
- “We’re the cleanest economy in the entire world.” — Vance (False, the United States ranked 17th.)
But while Vance’s claim might be based on an unidentified and inappropriate measure of cleanness, it is certainly not appropriate to judge it as “False” without identifying what it actually claims to be saying, and it is even more ridiculous to assign a particular rank from some unidentified study as if it were gospel. In particular, the claim could be interpreted in terms of total emissions, emissions per capita, or emissions per $ of GDP (which might actually rank the US as cleanest – even if only since a huge proportion of the US GDP comes from clean financial and administrative work managing the exploitation of remote dirty work in other countries).
- “We have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost.” — Vance (False, this is a ginned-up number that includes the Trump years.)
But the quote identified here as “False” is in fact a true statement about the current situation, and it would only be a claim that this was due to Biden/Harris that should be identified as false.
- “Less than 2 percent of that wall [on the border] got built.” —Walz (False, even counting only new barriers, as opposed to replacement barriers, adds up to 8.5 percent.)
Unfortunately it seems that the judgement here is correct – as is also the case for the one below.
- “Their Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies” — Walz (False, it does not.)
The next is a value judgement that I agree with (about intent and what is “bipartisan”) but not to the extent of declaring Vance’s claim objectively false.
- “Donald Trump could have destroyed [Obamacare]. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.” —Vance (False, Trump acted to kill it repeatedly in a partisan way.)
And finally, the teaser subset concludes with
- “Remember he [Trump] said that on January the 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully and on January the 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the president.” — Vance (False, this is a whitewash of what happened.)
But both of the claims here are objectively true. The urge to protest peacefully may have been made with a wink and a nudge, but it was in fact made at least once; and of course the attempt to prevent the transition actually did fail.