FactCheck Nails McCain Twice

Non-partisan web-site FactCheck.org nabbed John McCain twice this week for misleading or inaccurate statements in the 2008 campaign. The first was for his false statement that Barack Obama is to blame for high gas prices.

McCain's new ad accuses Obama of keeping gas prices high, all by himself. That's absurd, and McCain knows it – he has said repeatedly that our current problems were "30 years in the making."

The ad also tells us that gas prices are high because "some in Washington are still saying no to drilling in America." Not true. The federal government's estimate is that if the moratorium on offshore drilling were lifted today, it would be 2030 before we'd see a noticeable effect on supply and prices. For the same reason, it's simply not true that drilling more now will "rescue our family budgets."

McCain must have missed the recent ads by oilman T. Boone Pickens who agrees that "we can't drill our way out of" our addiction to foreign oil.

FactCheck also blew the whistle on McCain for claiming that Obama "voted against funding for our troops" in Iraq.

It says he "voted against funding our troops." He did – exactly once. Obama cast at least 10 votes for war-funding bills before voting against one last year, after Bush vetoed a version that contained a date for withdrawal from Iraq. It says he "hasn't been to Iraq for years." He was headed there at the time the ad was released, however, and had been there in 2006.

It says he "never held a single hearing on Afghanistan." It was the full Senate Foreign Relations Committee, not Obama's subcommittee, that had the hearings on this global hot spot, and Obama attended one of those. Over the same time period, McCain himself attended none of the Afghanistan hearings held by the Armed Services Committee on which he serves.

The unofficial TSC tally of misleading or inaccurate statements in the 2008 general election campaign according to FactCheck now stands at 12 for McCain and 5 for Obama.