RiverDog wrote:
Oh, come off it, Ida! I gave you a whole bunch of Trump lies a few months ago when the subject came up and you ignored it. My favorite was Trump's claim that the problem with the California wildfires was due to them diverting water into the Pacific Ocean. A person would have to have their head in the sand not to have heard at least a couple dozen Trump lies, the latest being that without a single shred of evidence, he's claiming that the Dems are financing the migrant caravan.
But since you asked, here's just a few. Get out your popcorn!
The president falsely said “prior to last year” the amount other NATO countries spent on defense “was going down and down very substantially.” In fact, NATO Europe and Canada increased defense spending in 2015 and 2016.
You should know better than to rely on the media to get your facts. Here's a NATO report that shows that in fact it was going down. Lets agree that we can both find "stats" that will bolster our own sides of this argument since percentage of GDP was going down but real dollars was going up. Also, we'd have to dig in the weeds about what is spent on the people vs what is spent on the equipment or "infrastructure".
For the politically left fact checkers from the media to say this was a lie is just cherry pickin' the data and morphing it into what their narrative is. From another perspective though, it was true what the president said.
https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/pdf_2018_07/20180709_180710-pr2018-91-en.pdfTrump also was wrong when he said that “many countries [in NATO] owe us a tremendous amount of money for many years back, where they’re delinquent … because the United States has had to pay for them.” Countries in the alliance that spend less than 2 percent of their GDP on their own defense are not required to pay countries that do.
Most Americans understand figurative speech vs. literal speech. The media will use either to advance their narrative and it appears you will too. You might get a laugh out of this next link by Bill Engvall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYSPlRl5hq8After listening to that, do you really think he was singing or even knows the Singaporian national anthem or that he would actually pay the airfare? Is he really advocating "knocking out" that 5 year old kid? Hopefully it is starting to make sense what the difference between literal and figurative speech is.
The president repeatedly claimed that “everyone has agreed to substantially up their commitment.” But leaders of several European nations later said there were no formal agreements to increase spending beyond previously set goals.
Once again, words "MEAN" things. So Trump lied on that one, huh? Do you really not know the differnce between everyone agreeing (just so I'm clear here, does that have to mean 100% of the folks there or would 95% of them be "close enough" to claim everyone) and a "FORMAL AGREEMENT"? So now the literal word is not acceptable to the media but they infer what was meant and what was not meant. I should add that since this summit all
NON-US countries have upped their contributions to the tune of a combined $46B annually. Since it wasn't in a formal agreement that everyone signed I guess doesn't indicate that everyone agreed to do that. Its just a fluke that $46B just appeared.
At his press conference after the summit, Trump criticized NATO countries for failing to meet a commitment they made in 2014 to increase their defense spending to at least 2 percent of each country’s gross domestic product within a decade.
The countries memorialized that commitment at the Wales summit in September of that year after then-President Obama urged the allies to increase spending to combat Russia’s aggression in the Ukraine and the terrorist group known as ISIS.
NATO countries did increase defense spending in 2015 and 2016, but Trump falsely claimed that “prior to last year” their defense spending went down “very substantially.”
And the first link to the PDF shows that Trump was correct in all of this. Hmmmm.... I guess that didn't fit the liberal media's narrative so they spun it to real dollars and included infrastructure and didn't account for what they should have been paying in relation to their GDP. Nope, they only looked at the dollars spent increasing instead of the percentage it should have increased to. This reminds me of how the Democrats calculate e.g. Well we were going to increase the xxxx pet project's budget next year by 10% but now we are only going to increase it by 6% which means the Republicans are cutting (they might even say, "SLASHING") social programs by $Billions of dollars (in reality it is still a 6% increase to the previous year's budget).
A day earlier at a breakfast meeting, Trump wrongly claimed that NATO countries that have not been spending 2 percent of GDP for defense owe the U.S. “a tremendous amount of money.”
But Trump is again referring to the amount of money that countries independently decide to spend on their own defense budgets. There is no requirement that countries that spend less than 2 percent of GDP on defense reimburse those countries that do.
The president’s statement “is not accurate,” Christopher Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told us in an email.
“NATO countries do not owe the United States money. And the commitment they made to reach the 2% of GDP threshold was to have done so by 2024,” Preble wrote. “NATO member states fund their own militaries. They don’t pay us to fund ours,” he said.
Well there's some truth intertwined in this but it is a false flag red herring at best. First we have to remember "literal vs. figurative" speech again. NATO has NO BINDING AGREEMENTs on any of its members. That said, did you see what happened to the non-performing countries when Trump threatened to pull out of article 4 of the Nato agreement? They literally went berzerk thinking that we may not come to their defense if they were invaded. Why would they care if their expenditures on their military was sufficient for their people? Because it isn't and wasn't sufficient to deter Russia, Iran, China, etc. from invading. The only real deterent was the US saying we would come to their defense. So you could (not that you will) surmize that the reason these countries weren't invade is because of the resources the US spent on our military. Their peace and well being was because of our good graces and our tax dollars not theirs. Are they "Litterally" obligated to reimburse us for those expenses? No. Should they pull their fair share to relieve the US taxpayer for paying for their defenses? Yes. So if they don't pay their fair share, who should be responsible for the money? I guess you consider the US taxpayer as the responsible party and Trump on the other hand considers it the citizens of each of those countries. Trump understands that we are and have paid more than our fair share of the burden, all he's saying is for them to do their part on behalf of the American people. We're tired of paying for their defense (not likely the US is going to be invaded by Russia or China). NOTE: I didn't get into terrorism for a couple reasons, first NATO was not designed or interested in anti-terrorist defenses until Trump brought it up. Second, I don't think we want to look toward an alliance like NATO to address terrorism.
In fact, for the majority of the 29 countries in the alliance, the 2 percent of GDP benchmark is just a “guideline,” not a mandate.
Trump repeatedly claimed that “everyone has agreed to substantially up their commitment.” But leaders of several European nations later said there were no formal agreements to increase spending beyond previously set goals, and none was provided by NATO.
https://www.factcheck.org/2018/07/trump ... s-at-nato/
This one was already quashed above.
