Accusations Of Lying Dominate Republican Debate

It was a difficult week in debates for the truth. I already discussed the dishonesty from Hillary Clinton at the PBS Democratic Debate. At the CBS Republican debate in South Carolina (transcript here) there were accusations during the debate of candidates telling lies nineteen times. This doesn’t include any lies which fact checkers  have found.

Donald Trump was in the rare position of being the one telling the truth when he pointed out that George W. Bush got us into the Iraq war based upon lies:

“Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right?” Trump thundered when asked about his call for then-President George W. Bush to be impeached. “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none.”

Trump added, “George Bush made the mistake. We can make mistakes, but that one was a beauty.”

Trump later pointed out that Jeb was wrong about his brother keeping us safe:

“The World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush. He kept us safe? That is not safe. That is not safe, Marco. That is not safe,” he continued. “The world Trade Center came down because Bill Clinton [didn’t] kill Osama bin Laden when he had the chance to kill him. And George Bush– by the way, George Bush had the chance, also, and he didn’t listen to the advice of his C.I.A.”

“How did he keep us safe when the World Trade Center…excuse me, I lost hundreds of friends!” Trump said as the crowd booed loudly.

On the other hand, I’m not sure how Bill Clinton could be blamed when the Republican Congress obstructed his attempts to fight al Qaeda, and they certainly did not give any credit to the president who did kill bin Laden.

Trump called Ted Cruz the biggest liar, probably a position he holds due to being his most serious challenger at the moment:

TRUMP: You probably are worse than Jeb Bush. You are single biggest liar. This guys lied – let me just tell you, this guy lied about Ben Carson when he took votes away from Ben Carson in Iowa and he just continues. Today, we had robo-calls saying. “Donald Trump is not going to run in South Carolina,” — where I’m leading by a lot.”

I’m not going to vote for Ted Cruz. This is the same thing he did to Ben Carson. This guy will say anything, nasty guy. Now I know why he doesn’t have one endorsement from any of his colleagues.

CRUZ: Don, I need to go on…

TRUMP: He’s a nasty guy.

CRUZ: I will say, it is fairly remarkable to see Donald defending Ben after he called, “pathological,” and compared him to a child molester. Both of which were offensive and wrong.

Cruz counterattacked with an attack on Donald Trump for supporting funding of Planned Parenthood. Trump then defended Planned Parenthood despite his current (but not past) opposition to abortion rights:

CRUZ: You said, “Planned Parenthood does wonderful things and we should not defund it.”

TRUMP: It does do wonderful things but not as it relates to abortion.

CRUZ: So I’ll tell you what…

TRUMP: Excuse me. Excuse me, there are wonderful things having to do with women’s health.

CRUZ: You see you and I…

TRUMP: But not when it comes to abortion.

In yet another exchange which came down to honesty, Marco Rubio made this accusation against Ted Cruz:

I don’t know how he knows what I said on Univision because he doesn’t speak Spanish.

Cruz then responded in Spanish.

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