In response to a reporter with the Des Moins Register who asked him about his misleading ads, McCain stated:
I have always had 100% absolute truth and that’s been my life of putting my country first
This grammar is confusing, and makes it impossible to accurately say what is meant by McCain. Politico assumes McCain means he has always “told” 100% truth. If this is the case, it of course is a lie proven by clicking the large McCain in the menu on the right.
Unclear, +0 lies.
If someone says two mutually exclusive things, one of them must be untrue.
Back in 2007, McCain made some remarks referring to his daughter’s new Prius:
…when a College of Charleston student asks Mr. McCain, a 71-year-old Republican from Arizona, what he personally is doing to reduce greenhouse gases, he offers that he bought one of those eco-trendy cars for his 22-year-old daughter, Meghan.
“What’s it called, a Purr-ess? Pryuss? Peer-uss?”
“Prius,” someone calls out.
“Yeah, Py-russ,” the candidate clarifies.
“No, Prius.”
“O.K., Prius, Prius,” Mr. McCain says like a chastened schoolboy. “I ought to know the name of it; I paid for it.”
But American automakers are upset that McCain would buy a Japanese hybrid over an American alternative. McCain responded to a direct question on the issue:
“Actually, I think she bought it”
There has been lots of coverage on the reported flip-flop. We don’t have the records of who actually purchased the car, but one of these must be true and one must be a lie. According to the rules, if a lie is corrected, it is not counted against their tally. There is some wiggle room for McCain too: “i think” is a subjective term, and one of the two statements falls outside our window of tracking lies (before the conventions). For all these reasons, this will rest in the “almost lie” category.
Related, on September 7, 2008 McCain said to WXYZ,
I’ve bought american literally all my life and I’m proud.
Newsweek reports that he and Cindy have 13 cars registered in their name, and not all are American:
But the rest of his fleet is not all-American. There’s a 2005 Volkswagen convertible in the garage along with a 2001 Honda sedan…Cindy McCain’s name is on 11 vehicles, though not the one she actually drives. That car, a Lexus, is registered to her family’s beer-distributor business and is outfitted with personalized plates that read MS BUD.
UAW President Ron Gettelfinger is pretty upset, along with many others in Detroit.
But is it a lie? The one car he does have registered in his name is a GM made 2004 Cadillac CTS. The others are in Cindy’s name. Therefore this could actually be true, and we’ll note it as an almost-lie.
tip via Jim
Disputed Definition - +0 Lies
Rudy Giuliani at the RNC:
And being a “Top Gun” kind of guy, he became a fighter pilot.
According to factcheck.org:
McCain was a bomber pilot, and he himself makes this clear on page 173 of his book “Faith of my Fathers”: “I trained exclusively in the A-4 Skyhawk, the small bomber that I would soon fly in combat missions.”
Giuliani went on auto-pilot, repeating this lie told repeatedly over the life of the campaign by various surrogates and journalists.
Update: To be clear, one of our editors remains convinced this is a lie repeated not just by Giuliani, but also by sources like the New York Times. While there seems ample evidence that ‘fighter pilots’ and ‘bomber pilots’ are distinct job in the military, and that John McCain’s job was a ‘bomber pilot’, there appears to be enormous public confusion on the dwindling distinction between those jobs. Therefore, we are removing the point attributed to this entry.
Room for subjective, indirect meaning - +0 Lies
From a speech Sarah Palin gave in Colorado Springs:
[Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have] gotten too big and too expensive to taxpayers. The McCain-Palin administration will make them smaller and smarter and more effective for homeowners who need help.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are private enterprises publicly traded on the NYSE. Though chartered by the government, since going fully private decades ago they have held no direct costs to taxpayers.
From Fannie Mae’s website:
In 1968, Fannie Mae was re-chartered by Congress as a shareholder-owned company, funded solely with private capital raised from investors on Wall Street and around the world.
From Freddie Mac’s website:
In fact, Freddie Mac is one of the nation’s largest federal taxpayers. Freddie Mac is owned by its shareholders and, like other corporations, is accountable to its shareholders and a board of directors.
There you have it. About the only thing public here is the setting for Palin’s lie.
Editor’s note: it could be argued that this was a misspeak on her part. If she comes out and corrects it, we will reconsider this as a lie.
Update: It has been pointed out that though Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are private companies, therefore bearing no direct financial costs to taxpayers, Palin’s statement could be a reference to indirect costs. In that sense, you could reasonably infer any private enterprise or citizen is “too expensive to taxpayers”. We’ve removed the point and adjusted the score according.
Subjective Statement: +0 Lies.
Should we start pronouncing his name Lie-berman after this truth bender at the RNC?
In the Senate, during the three-and-a-half years that Senator Obama has been a member, he has not reached across party lines to get accomplished anything significant.
Obama helped draft legislation on nuclear arms proliferation, ethics reform, and more:
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/gop_convention_spin_part_ii.html
http://mediamatters.org/items/200801110003
From Factcheck.org:
Obama and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, for instance, teamed up on an initiative to lock down and secure both nuclear and conventional weapons worldwide, such as the shoulder-fired, anti-aircraft missiles that have been proliferating in recent years….Another example: Obama worked with Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, to write the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, which created a searchable database the public can use to look up details on federal grants and contracts. (McCain was also among the original co-sponsors of that bill, so Lieberman may have been tarring his own candidate when he disparaged Obama’s legislative accomplishments). Obama and Coburn also got together on a bill to prohibit the Department of Homeland Security from issuing open-ended, no-bid contracts for emergency response activities after abuses were found in post-Katrina contracting.
But since “significant” is a subjective term, we cannot deem this an official lie. It could be argued that not all of these passed, and the ones that did were not groundbreaking. But we’re keeping an eye on you, Lieberman…