Friday, 17 August 2018

Fact Checker: Pelosi twists an old McConnell quote and calls him racist

 
Democracy Dies in Darkness
 
 
Fact Checker
The truth behind the rhetoric
 
 

Pelosi twists an old McConnell quote and calls him racist

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in 2010 that he wanted to make Barack Obama a "one-term" president. This quote has riled Democrats for years, and they haven't let McConnell forget it. Democratic officials bring it up all the time to criticize the top Senate Republican as a rank obstructionist, often getting the words right but messing up the timing or the context.

In an interview with MSNBC, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) got the timing of McConnell's 2010 interview with National Journal mostly right. But she took his comments far out of context and called them "racist." That's a new twist.

We don't fact-check o­pin­ions. But Pelosi's par­a­phrase bears little re­semblance to what McConnell said in 2010 — he even said he did not want Obama to fail — and we are flum­moxed how this morphed into a "rac­ist" state­ment. McConnell was a tough cus­tom­er for Obama, his po­lit­i­cal op­pos­ite, but they did cooperate when their in­ter­ests were in sync. We gave Pelosi's baseless and incendiary charge Four Pinocchios.

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A reality check on Brett Kavanaugh's time at the White House

Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh was a top White House adviser to President George W. Bush for nearly five years after 9/11, and now that he's been nominated to the Supreme Court, Democrats and Republicans have been arguing over several issues involving his work for the president.

Republican senators say Kavanaugh's records from his days as Bush's staff secretary are not relevant to his nomination because the staff secretary is more or less a "traffic cop" who decides which memos and documents the president sees. But that's not the whole story. The staff secretary has subtle but important influence on policy issues and debates.

Democratic senators say Kavanaugh gave inaccurate testimony in 2006, at his confirmation hearing for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. It looks like Kavanaugh left out some relevant details, but the Justice Department declined to investigate whether he made false statements after reviewing the matter.

 

No filter

It's refreshing to see that, despite the big divide in political views, a wide majority of Americans still seems to agree that we should all be reading the same news and information online. That's according to a new survey by Gallup and the Knight Foundation.

Websites such as Google and social media platforms such as Facebook learn a lot about their users and have the ability to show them targeted content. But the Gallup and Knight Foundation survey found that 73 percent of respondents want to be shown the same topics as everyone else, and 80 percent want them to show the same articles from the same news organizations to everyone.

We're always looking for fact-check suggestions.

You can also reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @mmkelly22, @rizzoTK or use #FactCheckThis), or Facebook (Fact Checker). Read about our rating scale here, and sign up here for our weekly Fact Checker newsletter.

Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup.

— Salvador Rizzo

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