Fact-checking Republican attack ads in tight House races

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

Fact-checking Republican attack ads in tight House races

By Salvador Rizzo
August 31 at 3:00 AM

Attack ads are our bread and butter at The Fact Checker — and, boy, are we swimming in butter this week.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), has been running a series of negative ads about Democratic candidates in close races across the country. The super PAC has raised more than $100 million and, with control of the House up for grabs in November, the group's wall-to-wall advertising strategy seems to make sense.

But the attack ads themselves don't make much sense. We rounded up six 30-second spots released by the Congressional Leadership Fund over the last two weeks. These were literally the first six ads we clicked on while browsing the super PAC's YouTube channel.

The ads almost unfailingly portrayed Democrats as dangerous and outside the mainstream. A Rhodes scholar with a Harvard Law School degree is depicted as a profane and "disturbingly radical" rapper. (He's African American.) An ex-Marine gets an unsavory close-up of his tattoos and is accused of voting in the Maine legislature to allow others to buy tattoos with welfare funds (not quite). Two Democrats are wrapped up with terrorists in the ads, but neither claim really adds up.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/08/31/fact-checking-republican-attack-ads-tight-house-races/

Rating: Four Pinocchios

[SWBTATTReg]

1. Yes, and Josh Hawley (engaging Claire McCaskill for her senate seat, Missouri)...

has been claiming credit for pushing for funding of untested rape kits (apparently there are least hundreds, perhaps thousands of them) WHEN this has been going on for a long time, not just recently. So he's been taking credit (?) for this when this has been a problem that they've been addressing in MO (lack of funding) for some time. Problem is, Josh H. still hasn't got it fixed either, so he's claiming credit for basically doing nothing, when he's doing the same thing as others have done in the past, letting all know of these untested rape kits (there was an news article on these kits some time ago) and that funding was the problem.