MSNBC's Lies…Continued.

5. “No modern president, not even old Gen. Eisenhower, had saluted military personnel.”

Maddow, here, is making the claim that Obama isn’t expected to salute military personnel at all. This quote is years old, coming from the first time she felt it necessary to defend the president for lazily saluting, saluting without looking up from his phone, or not saluting at all. Since Obama’s infamous “latte salute,” in which he saluted two Marines while disembarking Marine One with a coffee cup in his hand. This claim is verified false. President Bush, his immediate predecessor, once managed to correctly salute members of our armed forces correctly by shuffling his heavy dog into one arm and reaching around. Although there’s no requirement for a president to salute the troops, every president has done it since Reagan started the tradition. Reagan began the tradition after telling a general that while he knew the protocol for saluting didn’t call for him to participate, he felt uncomfortable not returning the salute. The general told him that, ‘no one would say anything if he did.’ Every president since then has followed suit. 

6. ‘Liberty University fined students $10 each for refusing to go see Ted Cruz speak.’ 

That’s another example of a lie of (glaring) omission. The mandate was not, ‘Go see Ted Cruz speak or else.’ Rather, Liberty University has a program called “convocation,” which requires residential students to attend sometimes up to three events in week. These events can be anything from on-campus concerts to guest lecturers, to motivational speakers. Students are given a ‘reprimand’ if they are late for a convocation event. They are given one additional ‘reprimand’ for each fifteen minutes they are late to an event. When they have received four reprimands, they have to pay a $10 fine. Because Cruz’s even ran over 45 minutes, a student who missed the whole thing would receive four reprimands and be issued a fine. Liberty is a Christian university, and it also issues ‘reprimands’ for crimes such as possessing an R-rated movie and staying out late. It’s unlikely that the type of student who would willingly agree to those rules would object too strenuously to seeing Cruz speak. 

7. ‘There is a very identifiable Somali community,’ in Biden’s home town and he is friends with them. 

At this point, any sensible person just assumes that when Biden says something like this, he’s making it up or otherwise saying somethin
g ridiculous, especially if he adds, ‘for real,’ afterwards. MSNBC reports it as fact. CNN actually caught this lie pretty quickly. Despite Joe Biden’s claim that he knows many Somalis who live in his hometown and has made friends with many of them because ‘there’s an awful lot driving cabs’ CNN found that the Somali population in Wilmington, Delaware is negligible. None of Joe Biden’s Somali cab-driving friends could be reached for comment…or found at all…if they even exist. 

8. All of Hillary Clinton’s grandparents immigrated to the U.S. 

Again, this was a claim made by Hillary and reported on without question by MSNBC and other liberal news outlets. Hillary’s claim was likely an attempt to identify with illegal immigrants, in some strange way, in order to secure their votes. However, the claim is simply not true. All it took was a little genealogical research and a public records check to prove that only one of her grandparents was an immigrant, Her paternal grandfather was born in England and was brought to America as a child by his parents. Clinton’s three other grandparents were born here.