Lie Count - Tracking our future leaders’ lies

At the presidential debate on September 26, 2008, John McCain said:

Back in 1983, when I was a brand-new United States congressman, the one — the person I admired the most and still admire the most, Ronald Reagan, wanted to send Marines into Lebanon.

And I saw that, and I saw the situation, and I stood up, and I voted against that, because I was afraid that they couldn’t make peace in a place where 300 or 400 or several hundred Marines would make a difference. Tragically, I was right: Nearly 300 Marines lost their lives in the bombing of the barracks.

When McCain came to office, nearly 1800 Marines were already in Lebanon under a presidential order. President Reagan needed Congressional approval to keep the soldiers in Lebanon, and McCain voted against that approval. Shortly after the bill was signed into law (P.L. 98-119, Multinational Force in Lebanon Resolution) in October 2003, 220 Marines were killed in a suicide bombing. McCain did stand up to Reagan, but the bill was to keep the troops already in Lebanon there, not to send an additional hundreds of Marines. According to the Library of Congress:

President Reagan sent a force of Marines to Lebanon to participate in peacekeeping efforts in that country; while he did submit three reports to Congress under the Resolution, he did not cite Section 4(a)(1), and thus did not trigger the 60 day time limit. Over time the Marines came under increasing enemy fire and there were calls for withdrawal of U.S. forces. Congress, as part of a compromise with the President, passed Public Law 98-119 in October 1983 authorizing U.S. troops to remain in Lebanon for 18 months. This resolution was signed by the President, and was the first time a President had signed legislation invoking the War Powers Resolution.

While McCain is correct in saying that he stood up to Reagan, the president was acting unilaterally in sending the marines. The bill McCain voted against was to keep those soldiers in place. McCain’s lying when he claims to have voted against sending hundreds more. He’s exaggerating near the point of a lie how many Marines were killed in the bombing too — 220 is not “nearly 300″.

At the presidential debate on September 26, 2008, John McCain said:

But there’s also the issue of responsibility. You’ve mentioned President Dwight David Eisenhower. President Eisenhower, on the night before the Normandy invasion, went into his room, and he wrote out two letters.

One of them was a letter congratulating the great members of the military and allies that had conducted and succeeded in the greatest invasion in history, still to this day, and forever.

And he wrote out another letter, and that was a letter of resignation from the United States Army for the failure of the landings at Normandy.

According to the National Archives, Eisenhower wrote only one letter, which they possess the original copy of. According to the original copy, it reads:

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

While General Eisenhower did pen a letter accepting responsibility, he never penned a letter of resignation, and there is no record of a second letter of congratulations written on the same day. McCain lied when he said otherwise.

During the first presidential debate between McCain and Obama on September 27, Senator McCain said:

Right now, the United States of American business pays the second-highest business taxes in the world, 35 percent. Ireland pays 11 percent.

Now, if you’re a business person, and you can locate any place in the world, then, obviously, if you go to the country where it’s 11 percent tax versus 35 percent, you’re going to be able to create jobs, increase your business, make more investment, et cetera.

In 2007, according to the IRS, corporate tax rates range from 15% to 39%. Companies with income above $18m fall in a bracket that pays 35%. But even assuming McCain was using the higher 39% bracket as his reference, despite citing the lower rate, there are a number of countries that have higher tax rates. Barbados has a 40% corporate tax rate, Guyana has a 45% corporate tax rate and India has a 40% corporate tax rate. (Those are just three examples.)

The Tax Foundation, a non-profit that focuses on tax plan analysis, does rank the US second in global taxes, but their figure limits the comparison to nations that belong to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a group which only includes 30 countries. So McCain would have to ignore at least 162 countries from the UN to mean “the world” if he even used that oft-cited study as his reference point.

Additionally, Ireland’s lowest corporate tax rate is 12.5%, not 11%.

John McCain is lying, both in his ranking of the US as having the second highest corporate tax rate in the world, and about Ireland’s tax rate.