As with nearly every aspect of political discourse, there have been numerous misrepresentations of facts in the past two presidential debates.

Each candidate used generalizations and selective truths to make a case for their campaigns, according to Syracuse University professors and national media sources.

Early on in the second debate Bush said, in reference to the Coalition Forces in Iraq, ‘it denigrates an alliance to say we’re going alone, to discount their sacrifices. … They’re sacrificing with us.’

But numbers show that while the United States may not be going it alone, they are doing the majority of work.

Of the 162,000 troops in Iraq, 138,000 belong to the United States, nearly six times as many troops as all other countries combined. American deaths have accounted for 90 percent of the non-Iraqi casualties.

The 30 countries in the Iraqi coalition have only contributed 24,000 troops, 8,000 of which are British. Also, eight countries have withdrawn from Iraq since February, according to the Associated Press.

Kerry repeatedly said in the all three debates and many speeches that the war in Iraq is costing the United States $200 billion.

‘Kerry is clearly inflating the cost of the war in Iraq with saying it’s $200 billion. The Congressional Budget Office and the government have reported that it’s ‘only’ $120 billion,’ said Charlotte Grimes, Knight Chair in Political Reporting at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. ‘That $200 billion that Kerry uses actually includes expenditures for Afghanistan, for homeland security, and it’s not just the cost to date. He’s wrong on the cost of the war, he needs to stop that.’

Kerry misrepresented job less in the second debate when he said, ‘Now the president has presided over an economy where we’ve lost 1.6 million jobs. The first president in 72 years to lose jobs.’

It is true that the private sector has lost 1.6 million jobs so far under Bush’s presidency, according to CNN. When the 1 million new government jobs that have been created are taken into consideration, however, the net job loss comes to 585,000. Bush may still be the first president since Herbert Hoover to oversee a decline in jobs, but that could change before he steps down, be that in January 2005 or 2009.

In both the second and third debates, Bush criticized Kerry for his liberal positions and tax increases, using figures that embellished Kerry’s votes on taxes.

‘Bush continues to say that Kerry voted 98 times to raise taxes; that’s very misleading,’ Grimes said. ‘Sometimes those are from procedural votes, and that’s not exactly accurate.’

Procedural votes are when the legislature decides whether or not to continue debate, vote on the issue at hand or retire it.

Kerry painted Bush in a bad light when he said, ‘Gen. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, told (the Bush administration) he was going to need several thousand (troops). And guess what? They retired Gen. Shinseki for telling him that.’

Gen. Eric Shinseki did tell the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, on Feb. 25, 2003, that several hundred thousand soldiers would be needed to occupy Iraq, and he did retire on June 11, 2003.

Shinseki’s plans for retirement were planned as of April 19, 2002, however, according to CNN and an article in the Washington Times, which said that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Army Secretary Thomas White ‘settled on Gen. John M. Keane, Army deputy chief of staff, to succeed the current chief, Gen. Eric Shinseki.’

Published on October 13, 2004 at 12:00 pm