On April 13, Minnesota Congressman and DNC Deputy Chair Keith Ellison told a "progressive" audience that "Women are dying because we are losing elections," specifically alleging that this is the case in Texas and Missouri.
It was yet another false claim — even if numerically true, the results would have to be tied to specific actions by Republican lawmakers in those states, and they aren't — in what has been a series of false claims made by Ellison during the past several weeks. Democratic Party operatives posing as "fact-checkers" have been predictably AWOL.
Tammy Bruce addressed Ellison's latest tall tale on the Monday, April 16 edition of Fox & Friends, and made an important larger point about how a favored leftist program is genuinely hurting women:
Transcript (beginning at 0:11 after host's introduction):
(pre-recorded clip)
KEITH ELLISON: Did you know in Missouri and in Texas and maybe other places, maternal mortality has risen. Women are dying because we are losing elections.
UNKNOWN MALE: Yes!
ELLISON: We don’t have the right to lose a damn election.
(Back in studio)
AINSLEY EARHARDT: Is this a bridge too far? Here to debate this is National Justice Director for Senator Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign, Tezlyn Figaro, and Fox News contributor and radio talk show host Tammy Bruce.
Tammy, I'll start with you.
TAMMY BRUCE: Sure, good morning.
EARHARDT: Is that true? Did you think women are dying because Hillary Clinton didn’t win?
BRUCE: No. As a matter of fact, even a part of what the Congressman mentioned, which was a survey out of Texas, has already been debunked as being incorrect, because somebody checked something wrong in a pull-down menu when it came to maternal fatality rates.
But it also struck me though, as really incredibly pandering, that woman are so fragile, so out of control of their own lives that if Democrats don’t get elected that we’ll die.
The fact of the matter is that women are at risk especially when they don’t have a job, when they don’t have enough money to pay the rent, when they can’t live where they want to live, when they don’t have enough money for their premium for health care or for the certainly for the deductible and the co-pays, that is where women decide to not to go to the doctor or take their children to the doctor, because of what as an example ObamaCare did to co-pay rates.
Concerning Ellison's maternal death claims about Missouri and Texas, as Lauretta Brown noted at Townhall.com Monday afternoon:
The statistic Ellison was referring to in Missouri has been attributed to the larger number of women in the state who drink or are obese. The statistics in Texas have been attributed to flawed data.
Last week, Ellison criticized Consumer Financial Protection Bureau head Mike Mulvaney for spending government money on frosted glass for certain offices, describing it as an example of (not kidding) lack of "transparency." The glass was ordered before Mulvaney took over the CFPB, and the director pointed out that Ellison's own office is, in Reason.com's words, "physically opaque."
In an item carried at a far-left website on March 21 — for trivia buffs, the same website which falsely reported not only that Karl Rove would be indicted over Plamegate in 2006, but that he actually had been indicted — Ellison attacked the allegedly overpaid CEO at McDonald's (but not the horde of athletes and entertainers who earn more, often far more), claiming that he is paid $9,000 an hour. Ellison also claimed that McDonald's is "clear-cutting forests so they can graze more cattle." Both claims are brazenly false.
The left's determination to cover for Ellison, perhaps even more than for other Democrats, is seen in the failure of that website to accurately reflect what Ellison said in the posted audio interview about the CEO's compensation. Despite the error having been pointed out several weeks ago, the text at the website's transcript of that interview still says that the CEO's hourly pay is "$3000," as does a highlight box.
Politifact hasn't fact-checked an Ellison claim in over a year, and has only fact-checked him four times in the past four years.
A search at APNews.com on "Fact Check Keith Ellison" (not in quotes Monday evening at 9:20 p.m. ET returned no results. The AP has posted at least 15 fact checks on Donald Trump in the past month, and several of those contain multiple items.
In a rare departure from fact-checkers' serial protection of Ellison and Democrats in general, the Washington Post in late March gave the DNC Deputy Chair's claim that he has "no relationship" with Louis Farrakhan its worst rating of Four Pinocchios ("a whopper"). Clearly, the complete list of Ellison's "whoppers" is much larger.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
