Iowa G.O.P. Presidential Debate: More Debate Lies

2012 Republican Presidential Candidates

At the Iowa Republican Presidential Debate, Newt Gingrich asserted that he balanced the budget for four years as Speaker of the House. And in claiming sole credit for the achievement, he glossed over the facts.

NEWT GINGRICH: "I balanced the budget for four straight years, paid off $405 billion in debt — pretty conservative."

In fact, the government ran deficits in 1996-97 and surpluses in 1998-99, the four years Gingrich served as Speaker. Budgets are not a one man show, so Gingrich can't take credit or blame for deficits or surpluses. The statement was not true.

Michelle Bachmann has the worst record of accuracy of all the Republican candidates, as rated by PolitiFact and traced by others. Fully 73 percent of her statements checked by PolitiFact were judged mostly false or worse. Gingrich was wrong the next most often, 59 percent of the time.


MICHELE BACHMANN: "We have an IAEA report that just recently came out that said literally Iran is within just months of being able to obtain that (a nuclear) weapon."

RON PAUL: "There is no U.N. report that said that. It's totally wrong, what you just said."

Bachmann: "It's the IAEA report."

THE FACTS reported by Calvin Woodard, Associated Press:

As Paul said, the report of the International Atomic Energy Agency does not state that Iran is within months of having nuclear arms. The U.N. agency report does suggest that Iran conducted secret experiments whose sole purpose is the development of nuclear weapons but did not put a time frame on when Iran might succeed in building a bomb, and it made no final conclusion on Teheran's intent.

Bachmann also erred by arguing that Iran has "stated they will use it (a nuclear weapon) against the United States."

Iran vehemently rejects that it is developing a nuclear bomb, let alone that it plans to drop one on the U.S.