“92 percent of the jobs lost during Barack Obama’s first term belonged to women,” Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina charged last night during the third Republican presidential debate. The fact-checkers at PolitiFact gave this stale, already debunked charge a big old fat “False” today.
Bear with me for a minute, because you’ll need to once again get out your right wing conspiracy chalkboards for this one. Now imagine a world in which a false charge made against President Obama is then used to demonize former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for no reason. Yes, yes, you’re getting closer to the Republican World View now.
So it is that Carly Fiorina, who was fired by the Hewlett-Packard board and has been deployed by the clever boys running the Republican Party to freely attack Hillary Clinton without worries of being called “sexist” (because, lol, she’s a woman and women can’t be sexist, see Sarah Palin), leveled this moldy, debunked false charge at President Obama in order to smear Hillary Clinton.
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“It is the height of hypocrisy for Mrs. Clinton to talk about being the first woman president when every single policy she espouses and every single policy of President Obama has been demonstratively bad for women. Ninety-two percent of the jobs lost during Barack Obama’s first term belonged to women.”
Oh? So somehow Hillary Clinton is the same as Barack Obama. No need for distinctions here. We might as well go around accusing every Republican of messing things up with those weapons of mass destruction and how about that Katrina response.
If Fiorina were a Democrat, we’d parse out her hyperbolic claim that every single policy of Obama’s has been bad for women, but we haven’t the time to go over all of history here and we have the Other Lie to focus on. Suffice it to say, President Obama has overseen record setting private sector job growth, signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and passed Obamacare.
PolitiFact pointed out how stale Fiorina’s already debunked claim is, “Her 92-percent claim dates back to the 2012 presidential race when it was used by the Republican National Committee and GOP nominee Mitt Romney. At the time, March 2012, the claim had some numerical validity but was also cherry-picked and flawed. We rated it Mostly False.”
Those Republicans sure know how to keep things hip. Why not dig through the dirty, failed laundry of 2012 in order to hit Hillary Clinton? I mean, the Benghazi probes aren’t working. Why not go Mitt.
PolitiFact broke it down:
The government data show an increase of 416,000 working women between January 2009 and January 2013. Total employment also rose by 1.3 million. So more women actually were working at the end of Obama’s first term compared with the day he first took office.
We used the January 2009 to January 2013 timeframe to be consistent with the original Republican framing of the critique of Obama’s economic policies.
Our ruling
Fiorina said 92 percent of the jobs lost during Obama’s first term belonged to women. By January 2013, the jobs numbers don’t back it up at all. The number of women with jobs increased by 416,000 during Obama’s first term.
We rate this claim False.
I’m going to go ahead here and give this a double false because Fiorina was trying to hit Hillary Clinton with this bomb and instead she fizzled out like a Romney, and didn’t even hit President Obama.
Talk about a fail.
Just remember, ladies, from the party who brought you Sarah Palin as aspirational, former Senator Hillary Clinton is a hypocrite because Carly Fiorina lied about President Barack Obama’s record. This totally makes sense if you were using your right wing chalkboards as instructed.
Please don’t look under the hood or you will be troubled to see that Carly Fiorina was blaming Obama for something that happened under George W Bush, whose brother Jeb Bush is struggling enough to fool y’all right now and doesn’t need this.
The stage was set for Fiorina to do her duty as female attack dog to go after Hillary Clinton last night and all she could come up with was a years old, already-debunked, stale Mitt Romney lie aimed at President Barack Obama.
The takeaway here is that the only position any Republican on stage was clear about last night is that they hate Hillary Clinton, and they will do or say pretty much anything in hopes of bringing her down. Maybe if they could keep the lies to things that she might have done herself, it would help their aim. Also, if it helps Republicans, Hillary Clinton is not Barack Obama or Bill Clinton.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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