What is this monkey business that Freepers are claiming

[King Coal]

that Dean publicly made statements about Gephardt and Kerry that were "blatant lies about their records in Congress". I listened to the debate yesterday and didn't hear any of that. Is there anything to that? I am having a debate with this idiot and would appreciate any help you can offer that is relevant.

[Don Claybrook]

1. They could be referring to...

and it's dangerous trying to plumb the shallows of a Freeper's mind, but they could be referring to Dean's contention that he was the only candidate to have balanced a budget. I think Gephardt and Kerry both took him to task, saying that in Congress they had balanced budgets under Clinton.

Of course, the flip side of that coin is that Kerry misquoted Dean about the pre-knowledge of September 11th issue on the Diane Rehm show, and Gephardt was schooled by Edwards after he tried to slam all the candidates with their previous free-trade votes.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

2. Ugly...

Either way, these candidates are looking more like the Three Stooges than the 9 Dwarfs.

[sandnsea]

3. And health care

Because Dean's prescription drug program primarily allows people to buy drugs at Medicaid rates. And if you go back and look at when Vermont enacted health plans, each one came after a Federal program or change in Federal law. Dean would have no health program without the work of Congress.

[Don Claybrook]

4. But where's the "lie"?

I'm not seeing it.

And of course, I'm not seeing where Congress enacted anything commensurate with what Vermont did, whether you consider Vermont either the chicken or the egg in this case. They still got healthcare for children (98% of them?). What similar thing did Congress do?

[mistertrickster]

5. Well, ask the Freeps . . . remember, they said BLATANT lies,

like when Bush said he saw the 9-11 crash on TV and he couldn't have because he had just arrived at Booker Elementary School or when he said that "the vast majority of the benefits of my tax plan go to the bottom of the economic ladder" when in fact 52 percent (of the benefits) alone went to people making more than 500,000 dollars a year. Or that Iraq was chock-a-block with tons and tons of weapons of mass destruction that could be used against the US turning our cities into a "mushroom cloud."

Now that's a blatant lie.

If I were a Freep, the last place I'd want to go is the question of who's lying. As far as I can tell everything that Bush says (that can be proven true or false) has proven false. I mean he says a lot of bullshit that can't be proven one way or the other like "tax reduction will help the economy" that you really can't prove, but every time he says something that is provable, he is always shown to have lied.

I mean he doesn't even bother to lie well. There's a website that has listed all of Bush's lies and it takes about 45 minutes just to read them all.