Cheap Beats By
Dre Voters didn't always get the straight goods when President
Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney made their case for foreign policy and
national security leadership Monday night before their last super-sized audience
of the campaign. A few of their detours into domestic issues were problematic
too.
Romney flubbed Middle East geography. Obama got Romney's record as
Massachusetts governor wrong.
At the same time, they injected a little more accuracy into two leading
misstatements of the campaign: Romney's claim for months that Obama went around
apologizing for America, and the president's assertion, going back to his State
of the Union address in January, that the U.S. military's exit from Afghanistan
will yield money to rebuild America.
A look at some of their statements and how they compare with the facts:
ROMNEY: Mr. President, the reason I call it an apology tour is because you
went to the Cheap
Beats Middle East and you flew to Egypt and to Saudi Arabia and to
Turkey and Iraq. And by the way, you skipped Israel, our closest friend in the
region, but you went to the other nations. And by the way, they noticed that you
skipped Israel. And then in those nations, and on Arabic TV, you said that
America had been dismissive and derisive. You said that on occasion America had
dictated to other nations.
OBAMA: Nothing Gov. Romney just said is true, starting with this notion of me
apologizing. This has been probably the biggest whopper that's been told during
the course of this campaign. And every fact checker and every reporter who's
looked at it, governor, has said this is not true.
THE FACTS: Romney has indeed repeatedly and wrongly accused the president of
traveling the world early in his presidency and apologizing for U.S. behavior.
Obama didn't say sorry in those travels. But in this debate, Cheap beats by dr
dre Romney at last explained the context of his accusation: not
that Obama apologized literally, but that he had been too deferential in his
visits to Europe, Latin America and the Muslim world.
Obama said while abroad that the U.S. acted contrary to our traditions and
ideals in its treatment of terrorist suspects, that America has too often been
selective in its promotion of democracy, that the U.S. certainly shares blame
for international economic turmoil and has sometimes shown arrogance and been
dismissive, even divisive toward Europe. Yet he also praised America and its
ideals.
OBAMA: What I think the American people recognize is, after a decade of war,
it's time to do some nation-building here at home. And what we can now do is
free up some resources to, for example, put Americans back to work, especially
our veterans, rebuilding our roads, our bridges, our schools.
THE FACTS: Cheap Beats
By Dre If Romney's apology tour was a campaign whopper, so has been
Obama's repeated claim that ending expensive wars meant the U.S. now has money
to spend at home. There is no such peace dividend because the wars were financed
largely by borrowing.
Yet Obama, too, watched his words a little more carefully Monday night, with
his milder suggestion that some resources are freed up. That's a more plausible
point, if only because U.S. resources include the ability to continue to go
deeper in debt, but for the purpose of fixing roads, bridges and the like,
instead of for making war.
ROMNEY: Syria is Iran's only ally in the Arab world. It's their route to the
sea.
THE FACTS: Iran has a large southern coastline with access to the Persian
Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. And it has no land border with Syria.
ROMNEY: Said that when he was Massachusetts governor,Beats By Dre
Cheap high-school students who graduated in the top quarter got a
four-year, tuition-free ride at any Massachusetts public institution of higher
learning.
OBAMA: That happened before you came into office.
ROMNEY: That was actually mine, actually, Mr. President. You got that fact
wrong.
THE FACTS: Romney was right. The John and Abigail Adams scholarship program
began in 2004 when he was governor.
ROMNEY: I said that we would provide guarantees, and that was what was able
to allow these (auto) companies to go through bankruptcy, to come out of
bankruptcy. Under no circumstance would I do anything other than to help this
industry get on its feet. And the idea that has been suggested that I would
liquidate the industry. Of course not. That's the height of silliness. I have
never said I would liquidate the industry.
OBAMA: Gov. Romney, you keep on trying to airbrush history here. You were
very clear that you would not provide government assistance to the U.S. auto
companies, even if they went through bankruptcy. You said that they could get it
in the private marketplace. That wasn't true. They would have gone through a
liquidation.
THE FACTS: Cheap beats
by dr dre It's true that Romney didn't preach liquidation of GM and
Chrysler and that he saw his approach as a way to save the auto companies. But
his was an improbable course. Opposing a government bailout, Romney instead
favored private loans to finance the automakers' restructuring in bankruptcy
court. His proposed government loan guarantees would only have come after the
companies went through bankruptcy. At the time, however, both automakers were
nearly out of cash and were bad credit risks. The banking system was in crisis
and private money wasn't available. So without hefty government aid, the assets
of both companies probably would have been sold in liquidation auctions.
ROMNEY on SYRIA: What I'm afraid of is we've watched over the past year or
so, first the president saying, 'Well, we'll let the U.N. deal with it.' And
Assad 鈥? excuse me, Kofi Annan www.cheapbeatsbydrestore.org came in and said
we're going to try to have a cease-fire. That didn't work. Then it went to the
Russians and said, 'Let's see if you can do something.' We should be playing the
leadership role there.
OBAMA: We are playing the leadership role.
THE FACTS: Under Obama, the United States has taken a lead in trying to
organize Syria's splintered opposition, even if the U.S. isn't interested in
military intervention or providing direct arms support to the rebels.Cheap Dr Dre
Beats The administration has organized dozens of meetings in Turkey
and the Middle East aimed at rallying Syria's political groups and rebel
formations to agree on a common vision for a democratic future after Syrian
President Bashar Assad is defeated. And Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton brought dozens of nations together as part of the Friends of Syria group
to combine aid efforts to Syria's opposition and help it win the support of as
many as Syrians as possible. The U.S. also is involved in vetting recipients of
military aid from America's Arab allies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Romney is partly right in pointing out Obama's failure to win U.N. support
for international action in Syria. But the Friends of Syria group has helped
bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid and other forms of
assistance to Syrian civilians and the political opposition.
OBAMA: What I would not have had done was left 10,000 troops in Iraq that
would tie us down. And that certainly would not help us in the Middle East. THE
FACTS: Obama was suggesting that he had never favored keeping U.S. troops in
Iraq beyond the December 2011 withdrawal deadline that the Bush administration
had negotiated with the Iraqi government. Actually, the Obama administration
tried for many months to win Iraqi agreement to keeping several thousand
American troops there beyond 2011 to continue training and advising the Iraqi
armed forces. The talks broke down over a disagreement on legal immunity for
U.S. troops.
ROMNEY: We have an enormous trade imbalance with China, and it's worse this
year than last year and it's worse last year than the year before.
THE FACTS: Beats By
Dre Cheap That's true as far as it goes but the imbalance is far
from unique to the Obama years. The U.S. has run a trade deficit with China
since 1985 and the gap has widened nearly every year since. According to Chinese
customs data, Beijing reported a $181.3 billion trade surplus with the United
States in 2010. That grew to $202.3 billion last year. The surplus for the first
nine months of this year was $161.9 billion, well ahead of the level at this
point in 2011.
OBAMA: You are familiar with jobs being shipped overseas because you invested
in companies that were shipping jobs overseas. And, you know, that's your right.
I mean, that's how our free market works.
THE FACTS: Bain Capital, the private equity company that Romney ran from 1984
to 2001, did invest in several companies that shifted American jobs and
operations from the U.S. to China and other foreign nations. In one instance in
1998, Bain bought a 10 percent investment stake in Global-Tech, a Hong Kong firm
that used mainland Chinese factories to make toasters and other appliances for
U.S. manufacturers that were phasing out American operations and jobs. Romney
held full Bain partnership stakes in that deal before the firm sold its holding
later that year. Bain also invested in several firms that outsourced to Mexico
in the early 2000s, but by then Romney had begun shifting away from Bain to a
role running the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. And in almost all of
these cases, it remains unclear how much oversight Bain had in the overseas
shifts. The Romney campaign has said that Romney's holdings were mostly passive
in nature, particularly after he left the firm.
ROMNEY: In the 2000 debates, there was no mention of terrorism.
Cheap
Beats THE FACTS: There was passing mention of terrorism in the 2000
debates. In the Oct. 17, 2000, debate between Democrat Al Gore and Republican
George W. Bush, Gore talked about his work in Congress to deal with the problems
of terrorism and these new weapons of mass destruction. And in the vice
presidential debate, Democrat Joe Lieberman defended the Clinton
administration's record of preparing the armed forces to meet the threats of the
new generation of tomorrow, of weapons of mass destruction, of ballistic
missiles, terrorism, cyber warfare. Romney's larger point, that the U.S. did not
anticipate anything on the scale of terrorist threat that existed, is supported
by the light attention paid to the subject in the
debates.http://www.cheapbeatsbydrestore.org/ |