Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [37]
The proof?
Hannity describes a couple of since-discredited studies and then quotes an editorial saying that “vouchers offer the only hope available to many poor students trapped in the worst schools.” Now comes the lie. “Want more proof?” asks Hannity. “Come right here to New York.”
He then trumpets The Miracle in East Harlem: The Fight for Choice in Public Education, a book that chronicles a remarkable success story in one of America’s most troubled school districts. What happened in Harlem? A handful of teachers and principals in District Four reorganized their district into small, independently run alternative public schools to which neighborhood parents could choose to send their children. The result? Hannity puts it best: “small, innovative public schools having just a little more freedom than traditional public schools has paid such big and valuable dividends in the lives of children and their parents. . . . Kids are learning in Harlem.”
Gives you hope, doesn’t it? But not for vouchers. Because the “Miracle in East Harlem” didn’t actually involve vouchers. There were no vouchers. None. Nobody got a voucher. Vouchers? Not a part of the miracle.
Even though he offers it as proof that “vouchers offer the only hope available,” Hannity carefully avoids saying whether or not the East Harlem program uses vouchers. Suddenly, he switches to the term “school choice.” The artful avoidance of a literal untruth makes this a particularly sneaky kind of lie. He’s deliberately misleading his readers. When you have to mislead to make your argument, it’s because you know you don’t have a case.
The debate over vouchers isn’t about school choice. It’s about whether to divert money from public schools (where it can fund programs like this one) to private schools. The Harlem story is about innovation within the public school system and, specifically, about the proven benefits of reducing the size of large schools. The federal Smaller Learning Communities Program aims to replicate the Miracle of East Harlem nationwide. In his 2003 budget, however, President Bush put the program on his hit list for termination.
LIE #2: THE NO-GROWTH NINETIES
This is a simple one. For some reason, in the midst of making a point about something or other on page 205, Hannity lets this one rip: “Decades of liberal no-growth policies have seriously endangered our economic and national security.”
Here’s a chance for you, the reader, to write your own joke. You might want to include a reference to how Clinton presided over the longest economic expansion in the history of the United States of America. I’m sure Hannity’s publisher, HarperCollins, will get a kick out of seeing what you come up with.
Send your rib-tickler to:
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
LIES #3 THROUGH #7: THE CRAZY TABLE
During the first 190 years of our great democracy’s existence, our government racked up $789 billion dollars in debt. That might sound like a lot. But during the eight years that Ronald Reagan occupied the White House, he managed to nearly triple that number. The day he left office, our national debt stood at $2.191 trillion dollars. That’s a hard number to even comprehend. If it helps, picture a stack of 2,191 billion-dollar bills. Lot of money, huh?
It is a sacred tenet of the lying right that Ronald Reagan did not cause the massive budget deficits of the eighties. Republicans keep trying to find new and creative ways to disprove the truth on this one.