What are Republicans for these days, other than making sure of full employment for fact checkers? There's going to be a good nine months worth of employment out of this week's CBO report debacle. However Republicans spin the CBO report, you know it's going to be misleading. Enter fact checker for the
Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, who tries to deal with
two attacks.
The first is the ad I wrote about Thursday. Sen. Kay Hagan's (D-NC) challenger, Rep. Thom Tillis hopped on the 2 million lost jobs bandwagon, and earns three Pinocchios from Kessler.
The Tillis ad gets in trouble by using language such as “Congressional Budget Office estimates 2 million lost jobs due to Obamacare.” First of all, it’s not jobs, but workers. Second, it is lacking context, since that is off a base of more than 160 million workers (i.e, less than 2 percent.)
Clearly a lie. Clearly. The one that right-wing media just isn't going to let go of (hell, they're still talking about death panels). Then there's the trickier move by some more establishment Republicans, like
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) who basically acknowledge the truth, but attack Obamacare as an economic catastrophe anyway. That's what the NRSC did in a news release about the report, and where our fact checker gets all waffle-y.
The headline actually tries hard to be restrained and relatively accurate. It says that the law will “reduce employment” and then carefully notes this is the “equivalent” of a number of jobs. The release further says “fewer people will be employed and fewer hours worked because of the unpopular law.” That’s phrased correctly.
That gets them off the hook from being fact checked by Kessler, but it's still pretty far from what the CBO actually said. Phrasing the CBO's findings as the law will "reduce employment" and "fewer people will be employed" clearly implies "jobs will be lost," which is not what the report says. Kessler's letting the NRSC skate on a technicality, but they're still saying that Obamacare is a job killer. Now they just have the cover provided by the so-called liberal media.
Expect them to milk that for all it's worth, and to keep up this lie.