The Washington Post “Fact Checker” column is crying “pants on fire” or something like it against Ted Cruz. The unsubtle headline is “Ted Cruz’s Four-Pinocchio claim that ‘the overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats’.”
Cruz told radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday there was a “simple and undeniable fact” that “the overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats.” Claiming this was a fact animated Kessler’s “fact” hunt, as he reported. So what are the “facts” at hand? Cruz’s staffers sent over the backup:
This study was featured in a brief article that appeared under this headline in the right-leaning Washington Examiner: “Jail survey: 7 in 10 felons register as Democrats.” But as we always warn politicians, you need to dig behind the headlines and news stories and actually read the studies that are being cited.
From the start, one can see something fishy is going on with Cruz’s claim. The study is a survey of party registration of ex-felons, not people in jail.
If there's a distinction here, it's one without a difference. Felons are felons, whether they can vote or not. This part is more relevant:
Moreover, while Cruz spoke of “violent criminals,” not all felonies (such as fraud or drug-related convictions) involve violent acts — and the study did not break down the types of crimes committed by the former prisoners.
This part of the study is also relevant:
Just three — New York, New Mexico and North Carolina. So that’s two blue states and one purple state, which is not an especially representative sample of the United States.
And how many states were studied? In those three states, the party registration of the ex-felons studied was heavily Democratic. But that may have more to do with race than anything else. African Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, and Hispanics also lean toward the Democrats. “About half of the discharged population is black in both New York and North Carolina, with Hispanics making up an additional quarter of the discharged population in New York,” the study noted. (Racial data was not provided for New Mexico, and North Carolina did not break out Hispanics.)
It's easy to suspect that this is what tripped Kessler's search -- the notion that the Post smells a racial angle, as conservatives easily recall the Dukakis-furloughed killer/rapist Willie Horton saying in 1988 "Obviously, I am for Dukakis."
So this is usually the area where the “Pinocchio” distributor might hand out two Pinocchios for leaning a little out of context. The Post “truth squad” defines this as “Significant omissions and/or exaggerations. Some factual error may be involved but not necessarily....(Similar to ‘half true’).” But no, Kessler gives it four Pinocchios, a “pants on fire” screamer.
This is where Kessler’s squad of Pinocchio-nose-pickers get into trouble. He claims to be "nonpartisan." But on November 12, Kessler only awarded two Pinocchios to Hillary Clinton’s long-standing claim she tried to join the Marines, but was rejected. This came despite Kessler offering testimony like this:
A former Marine lawyer, who was actively recruiting for the JAG at the time, says it is “ludicrous” to suggest someone with Clinton’s skills would have been rejected. Since the draft had ended, “we were frantic for lawyers,” he said, declining to be identified. Neither age nor eyesight would have been issue, he added. Many of the newly recruited lawyers were at least 26 years old and eyesight was only an issue for pilots, he said. Some lawyers he worked with had glasses the “size of Coke bottles.” Another Marine lawyer, who served between 1973 and 1978, confirmed this account, saying that one of the Marine lawyers he served with was a woman who weighed 200 pounds. “They desperately needed lawyers,” he said.
The pro-Hillary argument was very weak.
[O]ur former colleague David von Drehle reported that Clinton’s friends at the time “confirmed the story, though they were hazy on the details.” Diane Blair, who passed away in 2000, told von Drehle, “All I can remember is that she looked into it.”
Another Hillary friend claimed they would “test” the military and other institutions for sexism, but Kessler broke out another inconvenient truth:
But would women at the time need to test the Marines? Women have been part of the Marines since 1918, and were deployed to Korea in the 1950s. “By the height of the Vietnam war, there were about 2,700 women Marines served [sic.] both stateside and overseas,” according to the Women Marines Association. “By 1975, the Corps approved the assignment of women to all occupational fields except infantry, artillery, armor and pilot/air crew.”
After all that, Kessler concluded:
So far, we do not have enough documentary proof to say the incident never happened, such as supposedly landing under sniper fire in Bosnia or getting the date wrong for hearing a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. (Both of these were written by Michael Dobbs, who originated The Fact Checker during the 2008 campaign.) This is simply a personal recollection — one that at least two friends have confirmed they had been told about at the time.
But the circumstances are in question. She pitches it as a matter of public service, but her friends suggest it was something different. So at this point Clinton’s story is worthy of Two Pinocchios, subject to change if more information becomes available.
So this claim is wildly implausible on several levels, but there's "not enough documentary proof" that it "never happened." The faint "personal recollections" of old Hillary pals (living and deceased) are treated as "factual."
The headline was also much weaker: “Hillary Clinton’s claim that she tried to join the Marines.” Mr. “Nonpartisan” uses headlines about Cruz’s four Pinocchios, Donald Trump being “outrageous” and Ben Carson being “absurd.” Beware when liberal reporters put on their “Fact Checker” hats, because “facts” can even be disputed as “nonsense facts.”
On the "True, But We Don't Like You" beat was this anti-Cruz gem: WashPost Bashes Cruz on the Overlong Tax Code: The Lamest 'Fact Checker' Post Ever?
Cruz’s larger point to Hewitt on the November 30 show was about the Democrats assuming ex-convicts are their natural base – and media bias after the Colorado Springs shooting:
Now listen, here’s the simple and undeniable fact. The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats. The media doesn’t report that. What they report, and there’s a reason why the Democrats for years have been viewed as soft on crime, because they go in and they appoint to the bench judges who release violent criminals. They go in, and they do what Barack Obama tried to do, which is appoint a lawyer [who] voluntarily represented for free, a cop killer, to a senior Justice Department position. They go in and fight to give the right to vote to convicted felons. Why? Because the Democrats know convicted felons tend to vote Democrat. And so the media never reports on any of that, doesn’t want to admit any of that, but you can see in every one of these, every time there’s a terrible crime, they’re so excited -- come on, please, one of these be a Republican so we can try to pain the other side. It is one of the more egregious examples of media bias, and it’s something we see over and over and over again.
