It shouldn’t come as any big surprise that Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate was a bonanza for fact-checkers. Here are a few of the doozies that the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee point out. You can count on Donald Trump, of course:
“People are pouring across the southern border.”
– Trump
Trump is ignoring data that illegal immigration flows have fallen to their lowest level in at least two decades.
And Carly Fiorina went for it, as is her habit:
“One of the things I would immediately do, in addition to defeating them here at home, is bring back the warrior class — Petraeus, McChrystal, Mattis, Keane, Flynn. Every single one of these generals I know. Every one was retired early because they told President Obama things that he didn’t want to hear.”
– Carly Fiorina
Fiorina appears to have forgotten the circumstances under which David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal departed the administration.
You know, the circumstances of Petraeus having an affair with his biographer and giving her classified materials, and McChrystal’s aides being astonishingly unprofessional in a Rolling Stone interview. Oh, and Keane? Retired back in 2003. That’s before President Obama was even elected to the United States Senate, in case the math is challenging for you.
Ted Cruz has a plan to find out if sand can glow in the dark, and it involves mischaracterizing military history:
“To put things in perspective, in the first Persian Gulf War, we launched roughly 1,100 air attacks a day. We carpet-bombed them for 36 days, saturation bombing, after which our troops went in and in a day and a half mopped up what was left of the Iraqi army.”
– Cruz
Cruz oddly refers to “carpet-bombing” — a type of air campaign bombing sections of a city that has not been used since during the Vietnam War.
There is, of course, much more. Because it was a Republican debate lasting more than two hours, featuring the likes of Trump, Fiorina, Cruz, Ben Carson, and Marco Rubio, and telling the truth is not a strong suit there.