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By CJP | March 21, 2008
 Welcome to Fact Check Friday, our weekly trip around the Internet’s very best truth sleuth sites. We were hoping that the presence of Holy Week on the calendar would make this week a little less lousy with lies, but no such luck. We’ve got fibs, falsehoods and factually challenged statements galore…
- Hillary Clinton’s first lady schedules are being combed through to test her claims to having significant foreign policy experience. PolitiFact goes a step further and looks into Clinton’s oft-heard refrain that she affected the Chinese government’s posture toward human rights abuses when she went to Beijing and said, “It is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer acceptable to discuss women’s rights as separate from human rights.” That speech was important, say non-partisan experts, but it’s not accurate to credit it with any actual changes to Chinese policy. Clinton’s statement is HALF TRUE.
- Barack Obama is raking in the money, pulling in $55 million in February alone. But to dispel the impression that he might be a big-money candidate, Obama often points out that 90 percent of his donations come from people giving $50 or less. FactCheck.org fact checks that claim, and finds that although Obama does raise more from small donors than either Clinton or McCain, two-thirds of his money has come from people giving $200 or more. That statement is FALSE.
- When John McCain said that Iran was training Al Qaeda extremists and sending them into Iraq, he quickly corrected himself
and said that Iran is training “extremists,” not Al Qaeda. But “The Washington Post” reports that the gaffe was not McCain being forgetful or mixing up Sunni and Shia. Rather, McCain was making the case that that other U.S. officials have made : That there is a connection between Iran and Al Qaeda. Huh? The Post’s “FactCheck” blog looks into the claim, and finds that U.S. officials have found Iranian-made weapons in Iraq, and that even Henry Kissinger has made the case that Iran and Al Qaeda are in cahoots.
However, the Post says that no evidence exists to prove there is an organized relationship between Iran and Al Qaeda, and gives McCain two Pinocchios for being MOSTLY WRONG. As for Democrats who point to the comment as McCain not understanding the difference between Sunni and Shia, the Post says that’s NOT TRUE.
Come back next week to see who’s telling the truth, who’s not, and who’s catching the candidates with their hands in the cookie jar of lies….
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