Chas has been wrong in the past-
BLOWHARD BIDEN: WHAT A SCHMUCK!
Michael Medved, townhall.com, Oct 3 2008
Yes, Sarah Palin delivered a self-assured, charismatic performance in the Vice Presidential debate, erasing the most toxic doubts about her abilities and re-energizing the Republican campaign.
Joe Biden, meanwhile, produced a blizzard of misstatements, distortions and outright lies.
The most irritating and most seriously misleading involved the relative cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Three times, with great earnestness and passion, he cited a mysterious statistic claiming that we spend more every three weeks in Iraq than we have invested in the Afghan War for its duration.
Actually, statistics from The Congressional Research Service (posted on the website of the Center for Arms Control and Nuclear Non-Proliferation) show that our biggest Iraq expenditure came in Fiscal Year 2008 and reached $158 billion – or $3 billion per week. This means that Biden’s “three weeks in Iraq” would cost $9 billion at most.
And what about our commitment to Afghanistan? Has it really been $9 billion over seven years, as Biden suggested? The truth is we’ve spent $177.5 total in Afghanistan (compared to $661.1 billion in Iraq). This means that Biden either over-stated the cost of our war in Iraq TWENTY TIMES, or else understated the cost of our war in Afghanistan by a factor of twenty. Either way, the jerk is wrong by a distance equal to the width of the State of Delaware, and he delivered an Alaska-sized blooper three times in one evening.
As soon as I heard him make the comparison (watching the debate in a room with several hundred revelers who had come to celebrate my birthday) I blurted out, “He’s full of it! That’s an obvious lie.”
Sarah Palin was right, however, not to call him on it – and to lose the audience in a duel over statistics. But moderator Gwen Ifill (who otherwise did a fair and capable job, it seems to me) should have at least asked Biden for the source of his startling claim.
In any event, he now owes an apology to Governor Palin and to the American people. If he gets away with a distortion of this magnitude, it will provide powerful indication of the ongoing abdication of responsibility and fairness by mainstream media. |
