Fox News is trying to turn presidential candidate Joe Biden into Hillary Clinton by distorting his policy proposals for a clean energy revolution and falsely presenting them as a plan for massive blue-collar layoffs.
Host David Asman began by cherrypicking Biden’s remarks at last week’s debate where he said he’s willing to sacrifice “hundreds of thousands of blue collar jobs for clean energy.”
FACT CHECK: What Biden actually said was that he is willing to sacrifice those jobs in favor of new, clean-energy jobs. The reason he’s willing to make that sacrifice is because he sees “enormous” “opportunity for those workers to transition to high-paying jobs.” Biden also said, “We have to make sure we explain it to those people who are displaced, that their skills are going to be needed for the new opportunities.”
But not only did Asman leave out the part about transitioning to clean-energy jobs, he immediately compared Biden to Hillary Clinton. “Remember when Hillary Clinton said this in 2016?” He played a now-infamous clip of Clinton saying, “I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country because we’re gonna put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
In fact, that was another cherry-picked distortion. The full context of Clinton’s remarks makes it clear she was saying something similar to Biden, not at all what Asman was propounding.
Asman was helped in this deception by Stephen Moore, the hack economist whose now-failed nomination to the Federal Reserve board brought to light his $75,000 tax lien, admissions of emotional and psychological abuse of his wife and failure to pay her more than $200,000 in alimony.
Moore has also made real attacks on blue collar workers such as calling for the elimination of child labor laws and calling Rust Belt cities Cleveland and Cincinnati the “armpits of America.”
Not surprisingly, Moore’s history was not mentioned. Instead, Asman laughed gleefully at the prospect of Biden losing the election. “Oooh, boy,” Asman said, grinning ear-to-ear. “That may have cost Clinton key states then, will it cost Biden now?”
Moore laughed loudly and agreed that Biden “may well be” having what Asman called “a Hillary moment."
With enthusiasm, Moore added, “She got crushed in West Virginia, she lost Pennsylvania, she lost Ohio, she lost Wyoming, she lost all the coal states because guess what? People don’t like when politicians say that they’re going to take away their jobs. Now what Biden is saying is that he’s not gonna just go after coal, he’s going to go after the oil and gas industry, which by the way, employs not hundreds of thousands of workers but millions.”
“There are at least 500,000 people in Pennsylvania and Ohio that are employed by the shale, oil and gas industries,” Moore claimed.
Asman continued, “if you add up all the jobs in oil and gas from production to retail, all the way to people who have gas stations, 6.2 million.” He also said that there are only “a couple hundred thousand jobs in alternative energy” and, therefore, “the numbers don’t add up.”
But Biden has an ambitious plan to create new jobs and develop new green energy technologies, as he has made clear both during the debate and on his website, where he goes into much greater detail. He specifically states on his site that he plans to invest nearly $7 trillion, much of it by reversing Trump’s and other tax policies “that reward wealth not work." Biden also specifically states, “We’re not going to leave any workers or communities behind.”
Somehow Asman and Moore missed that, too.
Moore, who also has a history of promoting falsehoods, went on to claim that Democrats “want to represent the radical-green element of the party, but they also say they want to represent blue collar, middle class workers, and those two factions are in great conflict with each other.” As “proof,” he said, “Truckers are making $100,000” in “Midland, Texas and the areas outside of Pittsburgh.”
FACT CHECK: According to Salary.com, the median truck driver salary in Midland, Texas, is $38,293. The average truck driver salary is $53,438 near Pittsburgh, according to Glassdoor.
Watch Asman and Moore gaslight viewers below, from the December 28, 2019 Cavuto Live.
Both Biden and Clinton’s comments were about creating new jobs for workers who would otherwise be worried about losing their livelihoods due to the continuing decline of industries like coal mining. But for the Right Wing, isolated phrases are taken out of context to make the speaker sound as though they don’t care about those workers. This should have been called out when it was played in 2016 and it should be called out today. The simpler way to put it is to say that these deliberate misreads are LIES.
This is why I have needed to simplify my response when dealing with angry Right Wingers who continue to inflict these falsehoods – to something easy for them to understand, like : “NO. YOU ARE LYING. STOP DOING THAT. AND STOP PROMOTING HATRED AND BIGOTRY. SHAME ON YOU.”
Listened in disbelief at a discussion just now between dreary droner Mark Levin and the utterly shameless Ken Starr – don’t think I have ever heard a more prolonged barrage of faux intellectual drivel in my life!
MSNBC with their progressive pundits spewing their continual false narrative of so many Americans working 3 jobs. Look it up folks. People with 2 or more jobs hasn’t been more than the single digits in 20 years and has declined since the mid-90s.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2018/4-point-9-percent-of-workers-held-more-than-one-job-at-the-same-time-in-2017.htm
Biden – while I like him – talking about millions of jobs created installing charge stations. We’re talking temporary jobs and only 550,000 stations by his own count. Cue joke how many liberals does it take to install a charging station?
Then here Miller boasts 600 billion in GDP created while forgetting to mention the GOP tax cut adds 1 trillion in debt stimulus per year. Speaking of economic estimates – those that Miller apparently ignores – GDP grow is running around 2% against boasts by Trump butt-munching shills like him GDP will grow 6% or more.
Assman… errr… Asman shove your smug lie the tax cut didn’t focus on the rich. 40% went to corporations. Of the remaining 60%, most went to the top 10% income group. When Trump leaves office it’s timed to send zippo to the middle class, everything to rich and corporations.
Even the Fox graphic of unemployment drops undermines their case. The graph line looks dramatic given the scale but it only dropped from ~4.6% to ~3.4%. Hardly dramatic because Obama had already recovered our employment collapse from the Great Recession to near full employment.
Both sides are telling their bases what they want to hear. Progressives forcibly mix economics with environmentalism. Trump sycophants tell MAGAts the stagnation they’re experiencing isn’t real; their personal finances are expanding exponentially as Trump sits on his pile of gold counting.