May 23, 2008

Barack Obama lies, falsely accuses Dobbs, Limbaugh of inciting hate crimes

At a Florida fundraiser yesterday, Barack Obama said this:

"A certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia. There's a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year... If you have people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh ginning things up, it's not surprising that would happen."

Those statements are beyond reprehensible, and come close to accusing Dobbs and Limbaugh of breaking the law. And, the reason he did it is because he's completely corrupt, hoping to obtain political power by supporting illegal immigration. Rather than supporting our laws as a U.S. Senator should, he smears those who oppose law-breaking.

Moreover, Obama lied yet again. See how the SPLC's "The Year in Hate" misled about FBI hate crime statistics. See also the FactCheck discussion of one of the February debates:

However, Obama was being overly dramatic when he said, "we have seen hate crimes skyrocket in the wake of the immigration debate."

That's saying a bit much. When we asked his campaign for documentation, they pointed us to the most recent FBI statistics, which actually show that the number of incidents classified officially as "hate crimes" went up 7.8 percent in 2006. (Figures for 2007, which would show what occurred during and after the highly charged debate on the House and Senate immigration bills last year, won't be available until much later in 2008.)

We think a 7.8 percent increase hardly qualifies as a "skyrocket." Looking only at the incidents in which Hispanics were targeted, "hate crimes" rose a bit more, 10.3 percent, but that's hardly a rocket-propelled rise either. Furthermore, the number of anti-Hispanic incidents fluctuates widely from year to year. During the last 11 years, the number of incidents nationwide has bounced around between a low of 426 in 2003 and a high of 597 in 2001, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. It was 576 in 2006.

UPDATE: Here's a segment from the Lou Dobbs show on Obama's lie. Note the figures from the FBI that show that Obama lied, and note also that the Obama campaign couldn't tell them where Obama got his statistics:

Posted to Immigration2008a at May 23, 2008 01:30 PM