NYC Letter: Pants On Fire XIV -- Nancy Pelosi

Day 983 of CHOPE

There are lies, damn lies, Team Barry on any given day, and then, in a class by herself, there is Nancy Pelosi.

PEERLESS LIAR
There Is No Higher Rating

Ms. Pelosi spends a lot of time lying, and yet she is not very good at it. Mostly she is not very clever about lying (and this and this and this). She is not very clever about lying because she thinks you are utterly stupid. You are so utterly stupid any old lie will do -- Ha! -- you'll never catch her out. Her contempt for your intelligence is boundless (oh, and this). To wit.

Back in May Ms. Pelosi posted the below chart (sans word balloons) on her Flickr site. It was later re-posted to MoveOn.org. This fantastic chart shows Mr. Bush (43) increasing the debt seven-to-one over Mr. Obama.

BOGUSITY
New Spin On Old Spin

PolitiFact debunked the chart's conceptual design, data selection, and an assortment of errors, concluding:

We find so much wrong with this chart that we don’t think it contains any significant approximation of the truth. It made a major calculation error that dramatically skewed the debt increase away from Obama and toward George W. Bush. It glossed over significant variations in time served in office. It cherry-picked the measurement that was favorable to its cause. And it is contradicted by statistics for GDP-adjusted debt, which show Obama to be the most, rather than the least, debt-creating president of the last five. None of this suggests that Obama can’t turn things around as the economy improves (and Democrats can also take some solace in the fact that Bill Clinton did remarkably well in all of our measurements). But in communicating which administrations contributed the most to growth of the debt, this chart is a failure. We rate it Pants on Fire.

MoveOn.org never removed the chart from its Web site and now this same chart is back via Facebook.

The Fact Checker
A BOGUS CHART ON OBAMA AND THE DEBT
GETS A NEW LEASE ON LIFE

WASHINGTON September 29, 2011 (WaPo) - The person who posted this on Facebook noted: “From the US Treasury Dept — any questions?” But it actually is not a Treasury Department calculation, just manipulated data taken from the Treasury Web site.

... If the chart actually used public debt rather than gross debt, it would have put Obama and George W. Bush virtually in the same league — 60 percent increase (as of September 2011) for Obama versus 70 percent for Bush — even though Bush served as president much longer.

... If the chart were recast to show how much the debt went up as a percentage of GDP, it would look pretty bad for Obama after not even three years in office. In fact, Obama does almost twice as poorly as Reagan — and four times worse than George W. Bush.

Reagan: plus 14.9 percentage points
GHW Bush: plus 7.1 percentage points
Clinton: down 13.4 percentage points
GW Bush: plus 5.6 percentage points
Obama: plus 24.6 percentage points

... If MoveOn.org or Pelosi’s office had any sense of shame, they would have quietly removed this chart from the Web when PolitiFact gave it a “pants on fire” rating four months ago. The fact that an outdated version is still floating around — and that people are still deluded into thinking it to be correct — is doubly shameful.

CHOPE.

Misinformation for the sheeple.