Fact Checking Lil Ricky

Lordy, lordy Rick Santorum's got another column out today!

Another opportunity for him to spin and mangle the historical record. Another opportunity for me to fact-check.

Ain't life grand?

It's good to see that Lil Ricky is trying to do something constructive with his time. I wonder how he fared with his interest-only mortgage? A half-mil was due this past November.

Back to his column. The general point of the column is Senator Obama's so-called "Israel problem." As evidence he cuts and pastes quotes from the record. Let's go take a look. The vote:

In Pennsylvania, Hillary Rodham Clinton defeated Obama by 10 points but won the Jewish vote by 24. It was as bad, if not worse, in other states with sizable Jewish populations. In November, polls indicate he will run 20 to 30 points behind the typical Democratic presidential candidate among Jewish voters.

He goes back to November (by my count more than 7 months ago) to bring up that last point. Perhaps he should have looked at some more recent data. Here's Gallup from April:

Barack Obama is faring better than might be expected among Jewish voters, beating John McCain in Gallup Poll Daily general-election matchups and trailing Hillary Clinton only slightly in Jewish Democrats' preferences for the Democratic nomination.

And:

In terms of the general election, Jewish voters nationwide are nearly as likely to say they would vote for Obama if he were the Democratic nominee running against the Republican McCain (61%), as to say they would vote for Clinton (66%).

And this is might be why Rick didn't want to reference this Gallup data:

Rather than declining between March and April, support for Obama versus McCain among Jewish voters has increased slightly, from a 23-point margin in favor of Obama (58% to 35%) to a 29-point margin (61% to 32%).

The results are similar for Clinton, who received 66% of the vote from Jewish Democrats in April, compared with 27% for McCain -- a 39-point lead. Clinton led McCain by 29 points in March, 61% to 32%.

Somehow I don't think that of the two of them Senator Obama should be as worried about the Jewish vote as Senator McCain.

Back to Rick:

In September, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution, by a vote of 76-22, that labeled the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. Obama didn't make the vote, but he trashed the resolution and used Clinton's support of it to drive a wedge between her and the antiwar crowd. At the same time, Obama famously announced that he would meet Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "without precondition" and declared that Iran was merely a "tiny threat."

This one will take a little work. Let's start at the end and move our way backward. Here's where the "tiny threat" line comes from:

And a transcript of the "tiny threat" part:

Strong countries and strong presidents talk to their adversaries. That's what Kennedy did with Khruschev. That's what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That's what Nixon did with Mao. I mean think about it. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela - these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviets posed a serious threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union.

Please note the comparison. Iran is a tiny country compared to the former Soviet Union (true). It's military might is tiny in comparison to the former Soviet Union (also true). The Soviet Union was a serious threat to National Security (true, again) and so Iran doesn't pose as serious a threat the way the Soviets did (again and again true). And yet to Ricky, he spins it into saying that Senator Obama says that Iran is a "tiny threat."

Not true, Rick. Not even a good try.

I've written on the meeting without "without condition" stuff before (go look for it, it's not bad).

Now onto the first part of Lil Ricky's paragraph. Rick is using it, I suppose, to imply that Senator Obama doesn't think that the Revolutionary Guard should be designated as a terrorist organization.

From the Obama website:

Obama Cosponsored The Iran Counter-Proliferation Act, Which Would Designate The Iranian Revolutionary Guard As A Terrorist Organ, Prohibit Trade With Iran, Freeze Iranian Officials' Assets, Help Combat Terrorist Financing.

And about that resolution vote. Rick seems to be making hay about the fact that Senator Obama missed the vote. Actually there were TWO Senators who missed that vote. Obama was one.

Senator John McCain was the other.

Rick ties up the column with your standard guilt-by-association argument. He goes after Obama for his connections to Jeremiah Wright (already denounced by Obama) on account of Wright's associations. Staggering. Take a look:

Then there's the company Obama keeps. The Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.'s anti-American sound bites are tame in comparison to his anti-Zionist diatribes. Everyone knows Wright honored the anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan with an award. Less known is that the bulletin of Obama's former church once featured an open letter from Palestinian Ali Baghdadi. "I must tell you that Israel was the closest ally to the white supremacists of South Africa," he wrote. "Both worked on an ethnic bomb that kills Blacks and Arabs."

Rick doesn't say what, if anything, Obama had to do with any of that. Or what he could do about it - other than leaving the church. Hey, he has!

Hey, speaking of associations, did you know that Rick Santorum is scheduled to speak at Reverend Hagee's Christians United for Israel summit this July?

Lil Ricky will be speaking TWICE on Monday, July 21. The topic of discussion is "Radical Islam: In Their Own Words" and I hope Rick does a better job quoting there than he does here.

Rick's associated with the same Reverend Hagee who famously said the Catholic Church was the "whore of Babylon" (and backpedalled just as famously when it wasn't politically expedient), he's also said that the Anti-Christ is "partially Jewish, as was Adolph Hitler."

Oh, Hagee also said the Anti-Christ is gay. That must explain Rick's "man on dog" comment.

Or maybe it doesn't. Who knows when dealing with Lil Ricky Santorum?