The Leftoid in question is Ohio’s Sherrod Brown; the Post writer is Glenn Kessler:
“President Bush, who I don`t quote that much — the first President Bush said a billion dollars in trade surplus or deficit turns into 13,000 jobs. So, if you have a billion dollar trade deficit, it means 13,000 lost jobs. Multiply that times 5 and 600, and you get a huge number of lost jobs.” –Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), interview on MSNBC, April 21, 2015
President Obama’s request for enhanced congressional authority to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade deal for the Pacific Rim, has divided Democrats in Congress. Appearing on MSNBC, Sen. Sherrod Brown argued the case against the deal by quoting a Republican, former President George H. W. Bush, as saying that a $1 billion trade deficit would mean 13,000 lost jobs.
Given that Bush was an avid promoter of free-trade deals, that did not sound like anything that George H.W. Bush would say. So we decided to investigate.
The answer, of course, is that Brown is full of it.
In our research, we found no evidence that Bush had ever made this remark. In fact, we found that there was only one person who ever quoted Bush as saying this—and that was Sherrod Brown.
This is an excellent example of how Washington politicians live in their own invented reality, with a self-perpetuating feedback loop. Even if Brown had quoted Bush accurately on exports, rather than trade surpluses, the numbers would have been woefully out of date. Given that Bush was president about a quarter-century ago, you’d think Brown would have checked to see if the ratio of jobs to exports had remained the same. You can’t “do the math” with ancient information.
Brown earns Four Pinocchios.
Remember: with the Left, every single word out of their mouths is a lie, and that includes “and” and “the.” And we have nearly two more years of this…
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