<<All of this lying has got to stop, >>
Starting where?(cont)
October 3, 2000; First presidential debate, Boston, Mass.
CLAIM: “I have actually not questioned Governor Bush's experience.”
TRUTH: In an interview printed by the New York Times on March 12, Gore said: “You have to wonder whether [Bush] has the experience to be president. I mean, you really have to wonder. ... You have to wonder: Does Governor Bush have the experience to be president? ... Again you have to wonder: Does George Bush have the experience to be president?”
— by John J. Miller
Sept. 19, 2000
CLAIM: Addressing a Teamsters meeting, Gore spoke of lullabies from his youth and sang, "Look for the union label."
TRUTH: The song was written in 1975, when Gore was 27.
July 16, 2000; NBC'S Meet the Press
CLAIM: "I've accepted for two or three months now your invitation to debate on this program," said Gore on NBC's Meet the Press. "How are you going to persuade [Bush] to say yes, Tim?"
Tim Russert: "Well, maybe you're helping today."
Gore: "Well, do you think so? But what kind of approach — can you get Jack Welch involved?"
TRUTH: On the Today show on September 4, Gore refused to make good on this pledge.
Matt Lauer: "I do want to remind you that back in July, you had already agreed to the Meet the Press debate with Tim Russert."
Gore: "Sure."
Lauer: "Why now reject it?"
Gore: "I still agree to it. But first, let's do the commissioned debates."
CLAIM: "You know [Bush] has never put together a budget. The governor of Texas is by far the weakest chief executive position in America and does not have the responsibility of forming or presenting a budget. He's never done that."
TRUTH: Texas law defines the governor as "the chief budget officer of the state" and orders him to distribute his budget to every member of the legislature. And Bush, in fact, has formed and presented budgets as governor.
"Under Bush, Texas' recidivism rate has increased by 25 percent."
TRUTH: Nobody knows what has happened to the recidivism rate under Bush because those figures haven't been published, due to extensive lag times in reporting. The most recent numbers are from 1994, according to the Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council.
Describing the Clinton administration plan outlined in the 1999 State of the Union address to have the federal government invest some of the budget surplus in the stock market: "We didn't really propose it. We talked about the idea."
TRUTH: Page 37 of the Clinton administration budget submitted to Congress in February: "The President also proposes to invest half of the transferred amounts in corporate equities." From last year's budget: "The administration proposes tapping the power of private financial markets to increase the resources to pay for future Social Security benefits."
March 1, 2000; San Jose Mercury News
CLAIM: “It’s not fair to say, ‘Okay, after his sister died, he continued in the same relationship with the tobacco industry.’ I did not. I did not. I began to confront them forcefully. I don’t see the inconsistency there.”
TRUTH: The same month Gore’s sister died in 1984, he received a $1,000 speaking fee from U.S. Tobacco. The next year, he voted against cigarette and tobacco tax increases three times and favored a bill allowing major cigarette makers to purchase discounted tobacco. In the 1988 campaign, Gore bragged of his tobacco background: “I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put [tobacco] in the plant beds and transferred it. I’ve hoed it, I’ve dug in it, I’ve sprayed it, I’ve chopped it, I’ve shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn, and stripped it and sold it” (Newsday, 2-26-88).
“My family had grown tobacco. It was never actually grown on my farm, but it was on my father’s farm.”
TRUTH: Gore had already admitted growing tobacco on his own farm: “On my farm, we stopped growing tobacco some time after Nancy died” (Cox News Service, 4-26-99). Also, Gore received federal subsidies for growing tobacco on his farm (Wall Street Journal, 8-10-95).
February 2, 2000; Good Morning America
CLAIM: “We won in every single demographic category” in the New Hampshire primary.
TRUTH: Bill Bradley carried male voters and voters aged 18-29, according to exit polls.
Democratic debate in Iowa
CLAIM: “Why did you [Bill Bradley] vote against the disaster relief for Chris Peterson when he and thousands of other farmers here in Iowa needed it after those ’93 floods?”
TRUTH: Bradley voted for $4.8 billion in flood aid and opposed an amendment, also opposed by the Clinton White House until the last minute, to add $900 million in disaster compensation.
November 30, 1999; New England Business Council, Manchester, N.H.
CLAIM: “I was a home builder after I came back from Viet-nam. . . . I know a good bit about how to make money that way. . . . To build this country is a great thing.”
TRUTH: A Gore family corporation, Tanglewood Home builders, built nine houses between 1969 and 1973 on property once owned by Gore’s father. “I believe he [Al Gore Jr.] came by a time or two, but not too often,” Jewell Dillehay, the contractor for the development, told the Orange County Register on February 20, 1988.
November 24, 1999; New York Times
CLAIM: “Unlike Senator Bradley, I was a co-sponsor of it.”
TRUTH: Gore and Russell Feingold never served together in the Senate.
CLAIM: “I carried an M-16. . . . I pulled my turn on the perimeter at night and walked through the elephant grass, and I was fired upon.” In 1988, Gore told the Washington Post: “I was shot at. . . . I spent most of my time in the field.”
TRUTH: Gore never faced direct enemy fire, although several times he may have arrived on the scene shortly after fighting was completed.
October 14, 1999; Gore ad
CLAIM: “I ask for your support, and your mandate if elected president, to send this treaty back to the Senate with your demand that they ratify it. I’ve worked on this for 20 years because, unless we get this one right, nothing else matters.”
TRUTH: Gore indeed “worked on” this matter for many years, but often in opposition to a test ban. During his presidential campaign in 1988, he criticized his Democratic primary opponents for “the very idea of having a complete ban on all flight-testing of missiles when we rely on deterrence for the survival of our civilization” (Washington Post, 2-22-88).
July 16, 1998; NAACP annual convention
CLAIM: “The Republicans know theirs is the wrong agenda for African Americans. They don’t even want to count you in the census!”
TRUTH: Most Republicans opposed the Clinton administration’s plan to conduct the census by statistically sampling the population rather than actually trying to count everybody.
February 16, 1992; C-SPAN’s Booknotes
CLAIM: Gore said his sister was “the very first volunteer for the Peace Corps.”
TRUTH: Nancy Gore Hunger was a paid employee at Peace Corps headquarters, 1961-64.
April 16, 1988; Democratic debate in New York
CLAIM: “I have written the law, along with one other principal author of the Superfund law, and amendments to the other major law in this area, which requires that companies improperly disposing of hazardous waste must bear the financial consequences of cleaning it up.”
TRUTH: Rep. Jim Florio, Democrat of New Jersey, wrote the first Superfund law in 1980. Gore was not a coauthor but merely one of 42 cosponsors in the House. Eight years before claiming authorship and praising the Superfund law, Gore criticized it for being “far too small to make a reasonable start on correcting this enormous environmental problem” (Congressional Record, 5-16-80).
1984 Senate ad
CLAIM: Narrator says Gore “wrote the bipartisan plan on arms control that U.S. negotiators will take to the Russians.”
TRUTH: Ken Adelman, director of U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency: “He had nothing to do with what we proposed to the Soviets” (Boston Globe, 4-11-00). |
