Spinsanity on the first debate

[Joe]

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news ... 819577.htm

The first presidential debate provided an opportunity to judge the candidates side by side. Absent in the tightly controlled format - and in much of the coverage afterward - was an assessment of the candidates' accuracy. There was much to assess.

For instance, Sen. John Kerry repeated the misleading claim that the Iraq war has cost $200 billion. As FactCheck.org and others have pointed out, the actual figure is less than $120 billion. Kerry arrives at the total by including money he expects will be spent next year and includes some funds that will be spent on Afghanistan.

President Bush also twice repeated a misleading figure from his stump speech: that 75 percent of "known al-Qaeda leaders have been brought to justice." Administration officials admit this figure is based only on known leaders as of Sept. 11, 2001, however, not any who have joined the terrorist group since then.

Discussing what he says are successes in the war on terror, President Bush claimed that "the A.Q. Khan network has been brought to justice." A.Q. Khan was a Pakistani government official known as the father of that country's nuclear weapons programs. He smuggled nuclear secrets to other countries, including North Korea. But as the Washington Post pointed out, he wasn't "brought to justice." He agreed to stop sharing nuclear secrets and was in fact pardoned by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, and no one else involved in his network has faced charges.

Kerry suggested that weapons of mass destruction were crossing the border into Iraq "every single day, and they're blowing people up." But there is no evidence WMD are crossing into Iraq; Kerry apparently meant that terrorists were crossing the border, not weapons.

The two candidates had one of their few factual disputes when Kerry said that "the President actually cut the money" for anti-nuclear proliferation efforts. Bush countered, "We've increased funding for dealing with nuclear proliferation about 35 percent since I've been the President." Who's right?

That depends on whether your focus is strictly on international nonproliferation efforts or not. The Bush administration has proposed cutting Nunn-Lugar - the primary government program for securing and eliminating nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in the former Soviet Union - by 10 percent in the next fiscal year. But the total nonproliferation budget for the Department of Energy has increased 75 percent while Bush has been president and is slated for a small increase in the next fiscal year.

Both Bush and Kerry attempted to score points with language the facts don't support. Kerry tried to blame the President for fire houses closing in the United States: "What kind of message does it send to be sending money to open fire houses in Iraq, but we're shutting fire houses who are the first-responders here in America?" But while the federal government does provide direct aid to the new Iraqi government, it provides only support grants to U.S. firefighters, and there is no evidence federal funding has played a direct role in any closings of fire houses funded primarily by state and local governments.

Bush tried to connect the recent terrorist atrocity at a school in Beslan, Russia, with al-Qaeda, who attacked the United States: "This is a group of killers who will not only kill here, but kill children in Russia, that'll attack unmercifully in Iraq, hoping to shake our will." But the terrorists who occupied the Russian school are extremists supporting independence for Chechnya. Reports indicate they have no operational ties to al-Qaeda.
If the first debate is any indication, the second will almost surely continue a disturbing pattern of playing fast and loose with the facts.