On the heels of last night’s first round of presidential debates, I’ve seen the event described as everything from a “shit show” to a “train wreck” to a “dumpster fire” and everything in between.
Frankly, it went exactly as we expected — Trump refusing to follow the rules, talking over both the moderator and his opponent, screeching at the top of his lungs, and lying like his life depends on it.
While fact-checkers were working overtime last night and into today, no doubt on smoking keyboards, Trump’s falsehoods were so numerous that I don’t know if they could ever all be corrected in this lifetime. However, the Marine Corps Times made certain that one Trump lie did not go unchecked.
During the debates, Donald attempted to distract from the mounting coronavirus deaths in this nation that were widely avoidable had he responded even remotely appropriately by claiming that his Democratic opponent Joe Biden is somehow responsible for the deaths of over 300,000 American troops.
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On the heels of this erroneous claim, the Marine Corps Times conducted a prompt fact-check and concluded that Donald Trump is, once again, full of shit.
In fact, they determined that Donald’s entire claim rests on “a five-year-old inspector general report that found widespread problems with Veterans Affairs record keeping but does not directly connect deaths to delayed care from department officials.”
Moreover, the Inspector General’s report concluded that these problems in the VA spanned back literal decades, and certainly were not only an issue under the Obama administration.
“In one case, a veteran who died in 1988 was listed as awaiting enrollment approval until January 2015,” the fact check report reads.
The military publication pens in another case, “one veteran… who appeared to have died waiting for care was shown applying for VA enrollment for the first time in 2009, and failing to receive any help for the next five years… however, the patient actually died in 1993.”
The report from the IG ultimately concludes that the record system of the VA was “generally unreliable for monitoring, reporting on the status of health care enrollments, and making decisions regarding overall processing timeliness.” However, absolutely nowhere does it name Joe Biden as an individual to shoulder the blame.
Try again, Donald.
You can read the full report here.
Featured image via Flickr/The White House
