"That’s what I expect over the next three days from the news media. There was no way to gloss over the extraordinary dishonesty on display in Tampa — but the urge to be “balanced” will probably mean enormous efforts to portray whatever Joe Biden, for example, says as being just as bad as Ryan’s barrage of deceit. Never mind whether there’s any real equivalence, which there probably won’t be."
"I hope I’m wrong."
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/an-orgy-of-false-equivalence/
So how much false equivalence have we seen so far? There has been some. You do see many in the media endlessly trying to "fact check" things that really don't require fact checking. Last night Erin Burnett was even attacking Michelle Obama wondering if her talk about student loans and struggles "is really true."
What you have seen is an attempt to claim that the Democrats gave bad economic information last night. Erin on her show repeated the often debunked claim that the President has had no job creation in 3 and a half years by counting the huge hemorrhage in jobs we had at the end of Bush's term that spilled over to Obama's term.
"Castro takes a debatable talking point from the Obama campaign — that 4.5 million private-sector jobs have been created since February 2010 (a year after the president’s stimulus bill was passed into law) — and makes it ridiculous."
"First, this statistic includes only private-sector jobs, which means the decline in government jobs is simply excluded. Total jobs created in the United States from February 2010 is 4 million — and it is actually still negative if you start counting from the beginning of Obama’s presidency."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/fact-checking-the-opening-night-of-the-democratic-convention/2012/09/05/ec50ad84-f73d-11e1-8b93-c4f4ab1c8d13_blog.html
First of all, the GOP has tried to "cherry pick" by including the job losses that started under Bush-ie, starting in January, 2009.
What is a fact is that the private sector has seen 30 straight months of job creation. It's true that government jobs have been shed-particularly at the state and local level. However, that's not much of a GOP talking point when you bear in mind that it's been the cuts that they pushed through in 2011 we have to thank for as well as their opposition to any fiscal stimulus.
What Kessler is not doing in his attempt to draw false equivalence is not looking at the GOP claim that Obama's policies have caused the lack of jobs. However, since what has led to the drop in government jobs is the cut in state and local jobs that Obama's Jobs Bill would have remedied.
Blaming the President for lost government jobs is a new level of GOP chutzpah.
I found this claim of dishonesty by Kessler simple nitpicking:
"For more than 200 years, our party has led the fight for civil rights, health care, Social Security, workers’ rights, and women’s rights.”
— from a history of the Democratic Party, on DNC Web site."A number of readers asked about this brief (20 paragraphs or so) history of the Democratic party, especially the first sentence. It certainly appears to ignore the party’s long and troubled history with race, literally leaping from the “200 years” phrase to 1920, when the women’s suffrage amendment was enacted.
The Web history mentions the leadership of President Woodrow Wilson in helping pass the 19th Amendment, without noting that he was a racist or that he repressed civil liberties — even to the point of jailing one of his rivals for the presidency in 1914 (socialist Eugene Debs)."
"The history also highlights the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Certainly President Lyndon Johnson, a Texas Democrat, played an essential role, but it is worth remembering that 80 percent of the “no” votes in the Senate came from Democrats, including the late Robert Byrd (W.Va.) and Albert Gore (Tenn.), father of the future vice president. Republican votes, in fact, were essential in winning final passage of the bill.
Of course, a quick little Web history does not give much space for such details. A more unvarnished perspective was presented in the 1992 book, “Of the People,” which Democrats distributed at the convention that nominated Bill Clinton. That book, written by real historians, obviously has a slant, but it found the space to mention such historical blemishes. For instance, it acknowledged that before the Civil War the party “played both sides of the slavery issue” and after the Civil War, the party “reached out a welcoming hand to returning Confederates, not to blacks.”
"The highly sanitized Web version looks silly by failing to mention such unpleasant facts."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/fact-checking-the-opening-night-of-the-democratic-convention/2012/09/05/ec50ad84-f73d-11e1-8b93-c4f4ab1c8d13_blog.html
Actually Kessler looks silly, even quibbling over a historical website. This is the best he can do in showing that the Dems are as dishonest as Paul Ryan?
In reality the Dems have always been the party of the little guy. They do have an untoward history with slavery and then segregation-though it's not normal for a convention website to get so comprehensive. But in the 19th century they were already the party of immigrants. They were the party for ethnics, Catholics, Italians, Poles, and Jews. Then as now they believed in the American Dream for everyone not just well born Wasps.
Since then they've made it more universal. Today, the GOP is the party that opposes immigration. The Dems have always embraced it.
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