There must have been an outbreak of honesty in Washington because Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler has sunk to inventing fictional statements to fact check.
Here is the latest statement Kessler deemed worthy of 1200 words of analysis: “To me, this is just more vindication of our actions. We passed a budget which, according to somebody from S&P yesterday, would have prevented this downgrade from happening in the first place.” – Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., August 7, 2011.
Pressed to identify what S&P statement Ryan was referring, Ryan’s office pointed Kessler to this quote from S&P chairman John Chambers: “If you get to the $4 trillion figure — which had been mentioned by the Bowles-Simpson commission, which had been mentioned by the president in his April 13 speech, which had been mentioned by Paul Ryan in his alternative budget — that, if you have decent growth behind it, would have done the trick.”
A plain reading of Chambers statement indicates that if any of the three plans mentioned above had become law, one of which is the Ryan budget, then S&P would not have downgraded the United States. Ryan’s statement claims that if his budget had become law, then S&P would not have downgraded the United States. The statements are perfectly compatable. There is zero contradiction between them.
But then how does Kessler end up giving Ryan “Three Pinocchios” – an indication of “significant factual error/and or obvious contradiction”?
Simple. Kessler makes stuff up. Specifically, he claims:
Since Kessler can find no fault with what Ryan actually said, he invents a “reasonable man,” who apparently is hard of hearing, and says Ryan’s statements would have led this poor soul to believe that S&P specifically endorsed the Ryan budget. But Ryan said no such thing.
The fact is that there are only two plans that have been scored by the Congressional Budget Office as reducing the debt by $4 trillion: the Bowles-Simpson plan and the Ryan Budget. The Bowles-Simpson plan was rejected by Obama and has never been introduced in Congress. Ryan’s budget, on the other hand has been passed by the House.
The Obama plan, meanwhile, does not even exist. CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf directly testified to Congress that he could not verify any of Obama’s debt reduction claims since, “We don’t estimate speeches. We need much more specificity then was provided in that speech for us to do our analysis.”
