Lie Count - Tracking our future leaders’ lies

On September 17, 2008 at a campaign stop in Ohio, Joe Biden said:

We’re not supporting clean coal. Guess what. China’s building two every week. Two dirty coal plants. And it’s polluting the United States. It’s causing people to die.

…

China is burning three hundred years of bad coal unless we figure out how to clean their coal up. Because it’s going to ruin your lungs and there’s nothing we can do about it. No coal plants here in America. Build them, if they’re going to build them, over there. Make ‘em clean, because they’re killing us.

According to the Obama/Biden energy plan:

Develop and Deploy Clean Coal Technology. Carbon capture and storage technologies hold enormous potential to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions as we power our economy with domestically produced and secure energy. As a U.S. Senator, Obama has worked tirelessly to ensure that clean coal technology becomes commercialized. An Obama administration will provide incentives to accelerate private sector investment in commercial scale zero-carbon coal facilities. In order to maximize the speed with which we advance this critical technology, Barack Obama and Joe Biden will instruct DOE to enter into public private partnerships to develop 5 “first-of-a-kind” commercial scale coal-fired plants with carbon capture and sequestration.

The Obama/Biden plan supports clean coal; In fact, it explicity calls for 5 “clean coal” plants developed in the US with the aid of their administration. When Joe Biden says otherwise, he’s lying.

From his recent interview with Katie Couric:

“When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘look, here’s what happened.’”

Your history’s a little off, Biden. Roosevelt was elected in 1932 and inaugurated in 1933, both after the 1929 crash. Plus TV’s were not yet made for consumer production, and were considered experimental technology. Ben Smith of Politco Writes:

As Reason’s Jesse Walker footnotes it: “And if you owned an experimental TV set in 1929, you would have seen him. And you would have said to yourself, ‘Who is that guy? What happened to President Hoover?’”

As with anyone, if he comes out to correct it, we’ll remove it from the tally. +1 for the blue camp.

Thanks for the tips, Bob F. and David C.

At a September 15, 2008 rally in Michigan Senator Biden said:

In the midst of this housing crisis, John McCain said, “I will fight for those that lost their real estate investments.” He went on to say, “It’s not the role of government to bail out big banks or small borrowers.” What about small borrowers? What about homeowners? What about the people who don’t invest in homes, but live in them? There’s an important distinction between the predators and the preyed upon.

According to the official press release, McCain’s quote was actually:

“As I promised last night, I will fight for those that lost their jobs, savings, and real estate investments.”

Changing McCain’s quote is not just unfair, it’s dishonest. Biden eliminated the middle of McCain’s sentence; the reference to fighting for those that lost their jobs and savings. He built a new McCain quote by assembling the beginning and the end or the original, only preserving McCain’s reference to real estate investments. Biden may have claimed he was quoting McCain, but he wasn’t - he was just lying.

From his speech at the DNC:

…but no, none, no relief for 100 million American families, that’s not change; that’s more of the same. 

From factcheck.org [pdf]:

In fact, McCain’s plan would leave nearly 66 million households without a tax cut – not 100 million. 

Using this sort of rounding, the 100-year-old Biden’s been serving in the Senate for 0 years.