Keeping Them Honest now on a pair of Romney campaign ads that , well they bend the truth, frankly. Both come from the Romney campaign and both repeat distortions and really outright falsehoods that have been debunked again and again, time and time again. Here’s one titled, “Apology Tour”. 

“The president began with an apology tour of going to various nations and criticizing America. I think they looked at that and saw weakness. The reason I call it an apology tour, you went to the Middle East and you flew to Egypt and to Saudi Arabia and to Turkey and Iraq, and you skipped Israel, our closest friend in the region. “

 

All right. That’s Mitt Romney repeating a charge that he’s been making since the campaign began. The actual words came from the final debate this week in Florida and just like all the other times, fact-checkers have called the charge flat-out false. PolitiFact calls it Pants on Fire false, four Pinocchios from The Washington Post fact-checker, and this on debate night from our own fact-checker, John Berman. 

So what are the facts here? When the president took office he did travel to several countries talking about American foreign policy. In France, for example, he said America has shown arrogance and had been dismissive, even derisive, though he also criticized Europe that very same speech. And in none of these speeches, none of them, in Europe or the Middle East or here at home, did President Obama use the word apology or say he’s sorry. So our verdict here is it is false to call the president’s speeches an apology tour, even if he was critical of past U.S. foreign policy. He issued no apologies. 

And yet the ad has just come out. Here’s a portion of ad number two titled “Highest”.

“The world needs a strong American and it is stronger now than when I came into office. “

“Our Navy is smaller now than any time since 1917. That’s unacceptable to me. This in my view is the highest responsibility of the president of the United States. And I will not cut our military budget by $1 trillion, which is the combination of the budget cuts that the president asked. That in my view is making our future less certain and less secure. I’m Mitt Romney, and I approve this message. ”

All right. So there are two charges in that ad, one that the Navy is the smallest at any time since 1917, and two, that President Obama is cutting $1 trillion out of the defense budget. Second item first, Keeping Them Honest, those trillion dollars in cuts were what Democrats and Republicans agreed would happen automatically over 10 years, if, I say if, neither side could reach a budget deal by year’s end. The Navy claim, that the last time it was so small was 1917, Keeping Them Honest, every major fact-checking organization, ourselves included, has found that simply is not true. Whether you’re making the comparison to 1917 as Mr. Romney now does in that ad, or 1916, which is by the way what he did previously, there were 342 ships in the fleet in 1917. Right now there are 285, which is in fact lower than 342, obviously. However, it’s been below 342 a lot of times before this, including seven years in the 1930s, every year since 2000, in fact. And Keeping Them Honest, we wanted to know why the Romney campaign despite being called out on this time and time again decided to repeat the falsehood in this new ad. It’s just not true. We invited them on the program to give their side. Of course, they declined.