Giuliani Wins PINOCCHIO AWARD!
Freedom Fighter
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/11/07/cnn-fact-checks-rudy-pinocchio-giulianis-cancer-claims/
CNN Fact Checks - Rudy "Pinocchio" Giuliani's Cancer Claims
By: billw on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 6:36 AM - PST
Wolf Blitzer: Elizabeth,tell us what Giuliani claimed and what you've
learned. Did he get the numbers right?
Elizabeth Cohen: Well, according to a lot of the folks we talked to, in
fact, all of the folks we talked to, they said he did not get his numbers
right.
It's nice to see CNN finally get around to calling Giuliani out for this.
One might be able to believe that the Giuliani campaign was simply mislead
by an article published by a right-wing thinktank except for the fact that
even after they were made aware of it Rudy blatantly chose to continue
repeating the false statistics anyway, even after the source being cited by
the Giuliani campaign contested it. That's not a mistake, it's a complete
disregard for the truth and an outright attempt to mislead. And this is
hardly the first time Rudy's been caught stretching the truth on the
campaign trail so far. WaPo's fact checker gave him four Pinocchios for just
this latest tall tale and went on to say:
The mayor seems to be making a habit of making sweeping statements with
little or no factual support. See our recent posts on his claims about
Mikhail Gorbachev and the end of the Soviet Union , the cost of health care
premiums, and his own record as mayor of New York.
That's earned him a cumulative 13 Pinocchios so far, which after some
digging I believe puts him way out in front of the other campaigns, and
WaPo's Fact Checker hasn't even gotten around to his more recent fibbing. It
looks like Greg Sargent has just caught Rudy telling "three lies in one
sentence" yesterday. It's past time we quit referring to Rudy Giuliani as a
"serial exaggerator " and get on to calling him out for what he is, which is
a serial liar.
----------------------------------
The Dangerous Rudy Giuliani: George Bush with Brains
By Michael Tomasky
Posted on November 6, 2007,
http://www.alternet.org/story/66986/
People of Britain: congratulations are in order. You have now joined
ferret owners, sidewalk artists, hot dog vendors, publicly funded
attorneys for poor people, low-income community college students,
museum curators, a couple of innocent black men shot dead by the
police, the sections of the New York City charter governing rules of
succession to the mayoralty and, of course, Hillary Clinton, as
objects of Rudy Giuliani's demagoguery and wrath.
You may by now have heard the story. In a radio ad that his campaign
prepared for New Hampshire voters, Giuliani tells listeners that he
was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2000 and goes on to say: "My
chance of surviving cancer - and thank God I was cured of it - in the
United States: 82%. My chances of surviving prostate cancer in
England: only 44% under socialized medicine."
The numbers are false. The actual five-year survival rate in Britain
is 74%, which is still lower than America's, but obviously high enough
for the figure not to have constituted fodder for a campaign
commercial. (Even the remaining, much smaller difference, is largely
explained by more widespread screening in the US, which catches many
more incidents of prostate cancer that are non-lethal.)
It turned out that Giuliani's numbers were from a seven-year-old
article in a conservative policy journal. The article was written by
his own healthcare policy adviser, who admitted that his comparison
was a "crude" interpretation of a study by a respected health policy
group. The group, in turn, said the article's author had grossly
misused its numbers.
That's about as red-handed as anyone in politics gets caught these
days. But when asked if the campaign would continue to use the figure,
a Giuliani spokeswoman said, "Yes, we will."
I know the form all too well. I covered Giuliani for a dozen years in
New York (note to angry American rightwingers preparing to email me a
warning to keep my foreign nose out of their business: I'm as American
as a Ford F-150).
The man lies with staggering impunity. But here's the thing: he does
it with such conviction and such seeming authority that people who are
not inclined to study the matter will believe him -- will in fact be
utterly convinced that Giuliani is speaking the gospel truth, and they
will prove almost impossible to shake from this conviction.
Giuliani's hypocrisy with regard to this ad doesn't end with the fake
statistics. As Joe Conason noted on www.Salon.com, Giuliani was at the
time of his treatment the mayor of New York and enrolled in a
nonprofit health maintenance organisation for government employees -
that is, mini-socialized medicine. And as Ezra Klein noted on Comment
is free, the treatment that saved Giuliani was developed in Denmark -
which, as Klein drolly notes, "is both in Europe and has a universal
healthcare system".
But none of this will stop Giuliani. He will say and do anything he
feels he needs to say and do to get power.
Newspapers write that he was "liberal" on social issues in his mayoral
days, as if his positions on abortion and immigration were matters of
conviction. Nonsense. He took the positions he needed to take to be
elected in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. (Although to grant him a
speck of humanity, I'd guess that his pro-gay rights views were more
or less genuine: anyone living in the city gets to know many gay
people.)
And now he is saying and doing whatever he needs to say and do to get
millions of rightwing Americans to support him. He recently told a
meeting of social conservatives that his reliance on God "is at the
core of who I am." As mayor he was known to attend mass almost never,
he obviously cheated serially on the wife (wife No 2) he married in
the Catholic church, and the only occasions on which I can remember
him invoking God when he was mayor were the two times he was forced to
say "so help me God" in taking the oath of office.
But forward he will charge, telling more lies with even more impunity.
And immunity, because in a culture where a sense of history is largely
limited to remembering certain stirring television images, he will for
the most part get away with it, confident in the knowledge that the
main thing most Americans will ever recall about him is the film clip
of him running from the rubble of the World Trade Centre on September
11. A far smaller percentage will know that the reason he had run was
because he had catastrophically decided to place his emergency command
center in the tower complex - the only building in New York that had
previously been the target of a major terrorist attack.
And by the way: shame on Gordon Brown for inviting him to No 10 in
September. Yes, there's a long tradition of presidents and prime
ministers welcoming party standard-bearers from across the pond. But
Giuliani isn't yet that. Brown had no business giving him the kind of
special benefit that an audience with a prime minister bestows.
Brown and all of Britain will be better off the sooner they figure
this out: Giuliani is a dangerous man. George Bush with brains. Dick
Cheney with better aim. Consider yourself warned.