How quickly can you hear a falsehood on the Al Franken Show on Air America Radio? Well, today, for me, it was about 15 seconds. (Is that a world record?)
I flipped on my radio. Bill O'Reilly was on commercials. So was Dennis Prager. I pressed a button, and for the first time in months, I stumbled upon the voice of Al Franken on Air America Radio. He was interviewing a guest, a nice, but naive-sounding, woman whom I later found out to be Anya Kamenetz.
In a few seconds, I heard that Al and her guest were discussing the economy, college, and the military. Within 15 seconds of tuning into Air America, Al's guest spewed the following whopper (audiotape on file):
"Well, the facts are this. The military is not meeting its recruiting targets. It's missing them year after year."
Yikes! Did she say "facts"? Well, here are some facts:
- All services of the military (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines) met or exceeded their active-duty recruiting goals for April 2006. [DoD link]
- All services of the military have met or exceeded their active-duty recruiting goals from Oct. 1, 2005 to April 30, 2006 [DoD link] and for the last eleven months straight (as of April 2006) [link].
- "All services are projected to meet their [active-duty] retention goals for the current fiscal year" (2006). [DoD link]
- The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps have all made their active-duty recruiting numbers for 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004. [link, DoD link, link and link] For 2005, all services met their active-duty recruiting goals, with the exception of the Army [link]. ("The last time the Navy missed its recruiting goal was in 1998." [link])
"It's missing them year after year"? Sorry, ma'am.
If you are a regular reader of NewsBusters, you may have already known a lot of this. The media has misled the public on the issue of military recruiting, and NewsBusters has covered this topic here and here.
I guess it goes without saying that Al did not correct his guest on her misinformation. Franken has a problematic history with facts. Did you know his recent books, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and The Truth, are teeming with errors, falsehoods, and misleading passages? [Click the titles for the links to learn the facts.]
