As has been well documented this week, Rudy Giuliani’s latest radio ad includes a patently false claim about healthcare. Confronted with reality, the campaign vowed to keep lying.
And sure enough, that’s exactly what the former mayor is doing. In fact, Giuliani isn’t just repeating his lie about cancer rates, he’s expanding on it. From Giuliani’s latest appearance on Fox News:
GIULIANI: I don’t want to see us ruin our health care system the way I believe Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and John Edwards want to do with socialized medicine. And make no mistake about it, they want to do socialized medicine. The chance of a man surviving prostate cancer in the United States is somewhere, when I was doing it, 82, 84 percent. It’s probably over 90 percent now. In socialized medicine countries, some of them can be less than 50 percent.
CAVUTO: And why is that? Because there’s a delay in care or —
GIULIANI: And the same thing is true, by the way — my wife will explain this to you in better, more detail than I can, because she has all these statistics — the same thing is true with women with breast cancer. The chance of surviving in the United States for a woman much greater than in France or in England or in Canada or in Cuba where Michael Moore would like us all to go for health care. (Laughs.)
There isn’t an accurate statement here at all. Literally, nothing. He starts by lying about Dems, then lies about prostate cancer survival rates, and wraps it up with a lie about breast cancer survival rates. The reality is the five-year relative survival rate for breast cancer in the U.S. is 89%. In Canada, it’s 86%. In England, it’s 81%.
The good news is, some media figures are starting to notice that the Republican frontrunner has an honesty problem.
Consider today’s column from the WaPo’s Eugene Robinson:
Even Rudy Giuliani would acknowledge that he can be prickly. Now, it seems, the tough-talking former mayor is growing estranged from empirical fact. […]
What I don’t want is another president who refuses to let the facts get in the way of a good story.
And Salon’s Joe Conason:
The former New York mayor did survive prostate cancer, but otherwise his statistical claims were not difficult to debunk, as reporters for the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC and other news outlets quickly discovered. Giuliani had picked up his numbers from an article in City Journal, a publication of the right-wing Manhattan Institute, and simply repeated them in public without bothering to check their validity. Unfortunately, they were essentially fraudulent figures, extrapolated inaccurately from old data (by a doctor who also advises the Giuliani campaign on healthcare).
And saving the best for last, there’s the inimitable Paul Krugman:
[H]ere’s what I don’t understand: Why isn’t Mr. Giuliani’s behavior here considered not just a case of bad policy analysis but a character issue?
For better or (mostly) for worse, political reporting is dominated by the search for the supposedly revealing incident, in which the candidate says or does something that reveals his true character. And this incident surely seems to fit the bill. […]
Yet what we actually have is the front-runner for the Republican nomination apparently basing his health-care views on something he read somewhere, which he believed without double-checking because it confirmed his prejudices.
By rights, then, Mr. Giuliani’s false claims about prostate cancer — which he has, by the way, continued to repeat, along with some fresh false claims about breast cancer — should be a major political scandal. As far as I can tell, however, they aren’t being treated that way.
To be fair, there has been some news coverage of the prostate affair. But it’s only a tiny fraction of the coverage received by Hillary’s laugh and John Edwards’s haircut.
And much of the coverage seems weirdly diffident. Memo to editors: If a candidate says something completely false, it’s not “in dispute.” It’s not the case that “Democrats say” they’re not advocating British-style socialized medicine; they aren’t.
The fact is that the prostate affair is part of a pattern: Mr. Giuliani has a habit of saying things, on issues that range from health care to national security, that are demonstrably untrue. And the American people have a right to know that.
A few columns like this one, and they will.