Who Won the Fiction Sweepstakes in Last Night’s Debate?

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I just took a quick survey of all the various fact checks of last night’s debate and totted them up. The following list includes only items that I judged (a) fairly important and (b) pretty clearly wrong or misleading, which means I left out several close calls. Here they are:

  • Trump says Wisconsin is $2.2 billion in the hole
  • Trump denied lobbying Bush for casino gambling in Florida
  • Trump says he never went bankrupt
  • Trump says vaccines lead to autism
  • Trump says illegal immigration costs us $200 billion per year
  • Trump says Mexico doesn’t have birthright citizenship
  • Fiorina says HP doubled its revenue under her leadership
  • Fiorina says sting video showed baby “with its heart beating, its legs kicking”
  • Fiorina says Obama did nothing on immigration reform
  • Christie says Social Security will be insolvent in “seven or eight years”
  • Christie says he supported medical marijuana
  • Cruz says Planned Parenthood sells fetal body parts for profit
  • Cruz says Iran gets to inspect itself
  • Paul says vaccines lead to autism
  • Huckabee says Hillary Clinton is under investigation by the FBI
  • Carson says a better fence was responsible for cutting illegal immigration in the Yuma sector

So the final score is: Trump 6, Fiorina 3, Christie 2, Cruz 2, Paul 1, Huckabee 1, and Carson 1.

Apparently Bush, Rubio, Walker, and Kasich didn’t say a single thing that was badly wrong. Good for them.

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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