Thursday, March 01, 2007

83- Lying Or Just Plain Ignorant? Bill O'Reilly Misleads His Audience, Part 2: Poverty

Today, we're going to have installment two of our series, Lying Or Just Plain Ignorant? Bill O'Reilly Misleads His Audience. The subject is poverty.

O'Reilly recently had as a guest Rev. Fred Candeler, of the Methodist Federation for Social Action. Rev. Candeler was objecting to plans to place George W. Bush's presidential library at Southern Methodist University. Candeler said one of the reasons was that Bush's economic policies violate Methodist social teachings on poverty.

O'Reilly challenged him by asserting:

[audio clip] Poverty is very low in the United States. It stands at below 10%. Even those who are poor have the basic staples of life, most of them, unless they're addicted or mentally ill. What's the problem with the president's economic policies, which have really been very successful, particularly after 9/11.

Amazing how in less than 50 words, O'Reilly can pack in so much disinformation.

An unsuspecting member of O'Reilly's audience would come away from this believing that poverty in the United States is under 10%, that we have a very low poverty rate, and that Bush's economic policies have been very successful in this area.

In this podcast, we thoroughly debunk O'Reilly and establish that:

--the US poverty rate is not under 10% but 12.6%
--Bush's economic policies have been a dismal failure in this area because every year poverty has gone up under Bush, except for the one year it stayed the same, and that extreme poverty has set a record high under Bush's regime
--tens of millions of Americans are increasingly at risk for falling into poverty, and
--the US poverty rate is not low, but is higher than virtually every other industrialized nation in the world

We'll also discuss the noxious right-wing doctrine of Social Darwinism.

Please listen to the podcast for the details.

(PS: Right-wingers, if you want to write in to me, fine, but at least do me the courtesy of listening to the podcast first. Please don't respond just on the basis of the brief preview above. Thanks!)

Jack Clark 3:00 PM [+]
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