6 of Bidens False Statements

1. Biden: Leaders Support Sequestration 

Reality: No they don't

Joe Biden said that the military has asked for a smaller, leaner army, implicitly justifying the sequestration.
Many military and congressional leaders, however, have registered their opposition to the military cuts in the sequestration, with one saying it would “hollow” the military.
The Foreign Policy Initiative compiled a list of legislative, executive, and military leaders, who have opposed the sequestration cuts.
Here are three highlights from military leaders:

General Raymond Odierno (Chief of Staff, U.S. Army): “With sequestration, my assessment is that the Nation would incur an unacceptable level of strategic and operational risk.” (November 2, 2011)
General James F. Amos (Commandant, U.S. Marine Corps): “We as a nation don’t even know, or have not got a sense of appreciation for, the impact that sequestration’s going to have on the Department of Defense… I don’t think we understand the magnitude of the impact that sequestration would have.” (November 14, 2011)
General Jonathan Greenert (Chief of Naval Operations, U.S. Navy): “…[I]n my view sequestration will cause irreversible damage. It will hollow the military and we will be out of balance in manpower, both military and civilian, procurement and modernization. We are a capital intensive force and going in and summarily reducing procurement accounts here and there will upset quite a bit of our industrial base, which in my view, if we get into sequestration, might be irrecoverable.” (November 2, 2011)

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta expressed exasperation at the looming prospect of the sequestration cuts, saying, “I’ll take whatever the hell kind of deal they can make now with sequestration.”

2. Biden Claims Syria 5x Size Of Libya

 Literally is not.

 

During Thursday’s vice presidential debate, Vice President Joe Biden claimed Syria is five times the size of Libya, but in reality it is not.Syria has an area of 185,180 square kilometers, while Libya has an area of more than 1.7 million square kilometers, making Libya literally nine times larger than Syria, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.

 

3. Biden: al Qaeda ‘Decimated’

Vice President Joe Biden continued to repeat Thursday a thoroughly discredited Obama campaign talking point that the terror group al Qaeda has been “decimated.”
“We decimated al Qaeda central,” Biden declared during Thursday evening’s debate with Republican Paul Ryan, echoing a talking point oft repeated by Obama and his campaign surrogates.
Intelligence reports and other sources, however, have indicated that contrary to this talking point, al Qaeda is actually on the rise across the greater Middle East and elsewhere.
An al Qaeda offshoot was credited with carrying out the deadly attack in Libya that claimed the life of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and several other Americans.
“Al Qaeda is, unfortunately, alive and well in the Maghreb, Yemen, and elsewhere, as the administration will probably admit after the election,” former National Security Council member Elliott Abrams, told the Free Beacon earlier this week. ”The claim that the organization was rendered toothless after [Osama bin Laden] was killed is simply not accurate, and every terrorism specialist in our government knows that.”

4. Biden Lies About AEI Study

Joe Biden cited an American Enterprise Institute study showing that Mitt Romney’s tax plan would raise taxes on the middle class.
AEI has said no such thing, though.
Alex Brill of the American Enterprise Institute wrote that the Tax Policy Center’s study—the one so heavily cited by the Obama campaign that claims a President Romney would institute tax hikes on the middle class—actually “falls apart.”
Brill found that, in order to keep the budget revenue neutral under the new tax cuts and closed loopholes, the government would actually have to cut, not raise, taxes on the middle class.
Brill also excoriated the TPC for misusing his work, calling their conclusion “a false interpretation of our research.”

5. Biden Inaccurately Claims Obama Doesn’t Want To Cut Military

Vice President Joe Biden made the false claim that President Barack Obama does not want to cut the military. However, the White House has cut the military’s budget by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.
Obama cut the Pentagon’s budget by nearly $500 billion dollars, with another $500 billion coming down the pike if Congress fails to agree on a deal to prevent the mandatory cuts, otherwise known as sequestration.
Obama has been clear that the U.S. military would be slimmer.
USA Today reports:

The new military strategy includes $487 billion in cuts over the next decade. An additional $500 billion in cuts could be coming if Congress follows through on plans for deeper reductions. The announcement comes weeks after the U.S. officially ended the Iraq War and after a decade of increased defense spending in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Obama said that the military will indeed be leaner, but the U.S. will maintain a budget that is roughly larger than the next 10 countries’ military budgets combined.

6. Bipartisan Paul Ryan

Joe Biden accused Paul Ryan of promoting a Medicare plan that has no Democratic support.
But Paul Ryan formed a plan to reform Medicare with Ron Wyden, a Democratic Representative from Oregon.
NBC News reported:

The Oregon Democrat joined the Wisconsin Republican in calling for a fundamental restructuring of the Medicare entitlement.
Sitting next to Ryan at the Bipartisan Policy Center event, Wyden said,  “There’s a window of opportunity here, a chance to change the conversation, lower the decibel level … and see if we can bring together progressives and conservatives” to create a system in which people on Medicare choose a private-sector health plan or traditional Medicare, if they want.
Wyden said their plan was “a model driven by choices and competition, here with traditional Medicare, and approaches that would come from the private sector, innovation that the private sector offers. We believe it’s going to work … .”