Once again, the country has been subjected to the weird reality show that for some reason we call a “debate,” in which a panel of elderly improv comedians holler fabricated claims. Last night’s was particularly important — not to America, but to the participants, because it was hosted by Fox News, the channel where they will probably be hired when they’re done pretending to campaign for president.
Of course, if you put a panel of idiots on stage and lob questions at them for two hours, they’ll say some pretty dumb shit, and so naturally last night Marco Rubio got his facts wrong about wages, Donald Trump was wrong about deporting Mexicans, and Rand Paul was wrong about income inequality. So! Let’s call them out, because as we know, if you point out that a politician is lying, they will never ever do it again.
The grabbiest lie of the debate came from Marco Rubio, who said that welders make more money than philosophers, and we need more welders. Well, that may be Rubio’s philosophy, but it’s not true. Philosophy professors make $63,000 a year, welders around $37,000. This, now that we look at it, is shockingly low. Welders seriously only make $37,000? Isn’t welding kind of important for making sure, you know, bridges don’t fall over and stuff?
Anyway, it was a good lie, in that nobody really cares about the substance of the claim. Viewers just want to hear that good-old-fashioned welding is more important than stuffy dumb philosophy. So even though Rubio’s claim isn’t true, I rate it as “true.”
With quotation marks.
And then there’s Donald Trump’s babbling about knowing Vladimir Putin. “I got to know him very well,” Trump said. “We were both on ’60 Minutes.'” Yes, it’s true that they were both on the same TV show. But they never actually met. Their segments were shot separately. In the same way, Donald Trump is not best friends with the actors who appeared in the denture commercials that aired between segments.
Fiorina got a fun little dig in at Trump after that: “I have met him as well, not in a green room for a show, but in a private meeting.” Zing! Of course, there’s a part of that story she’s leaving out: after the meeting, she had nice things to say about him. “President Putin was elected president in the first democratic transition in Russia in 1,000 years,” she said in a speech. “Talk about giving new meaning to the word ‘invent.'”
So on the subject of Putin, Trump was just flat out wrong and Fiorina was awfully misleading. But because their claims drew applause, I rate them both as “true.”
Rand Paul told the crowd that income inequality is worst under Democratic mayors, governors, and presidents. That doesn’t really sound right, and sure enough, it isn’t. For one thing, there’s no good way to calculate inequality like that, since parties come and go. The truth is that income inequality is pretty evenly distributed, and it doesn’t seem to correlate to party leadership. But Rand Paul’s been making this untrue claim for at least a year, and probably won’t stop, so I rate it as “true.”
Elsewhere, Mike Huckabee (nudged off-stage to the Little Kids debate) made up the fact that Syrian refugees are not actually from Syria. That’s not true, but since it’s racist and he’s a Republican I’ll rate it as “true.” Ben Carson says that raising the minimum wage makes joblessness go up, which is observably false in cities like Seattle but he’s never been here so I’ll rate it as “true.” And Ted Cruz said that there are more words in the tax code than in the Bible.
That last claim is one of the few made during the debate that is actually true, without quotation marks. It got a little laugh from the audience but in general everyone’s response was “so what?” And that’s what being honest gets you.