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LetMyPeopleVote

(154,427 posts)
Wed Sep 14, 2022, 08:44 AM Sep 2022

Fact check: Greg Abbott attack ad deceptively alters Beto O'Rourke's comments on policing

The idiots who started the Defund the Police taking point cost Democrats several seats in the 2020 election. This talking point was stupid and the GOP was able to use this moronic taking point to great effect. Now Abbott is using this moronic talking point against Beto.

I have heard Greg Abbott's commercial using these lies several times.



https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/23/politics/fact-check-abbott-ad-orourke-defund-police/index.html

Democrat Beto O'Rourke, the former Texas congressman who ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate in 2018 and the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, announced last week that he is running for Texas governor in 2022.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who announced Tuesday that he had filed to run for reelection, started attacking O'Rourke as radical and out of touch even before O'Rourke made his gubernatorial candidacy official. In a 30-second video ad released online in late October, Abbott's campaign drew attention to comments O'Rourke made on a podcast in June 2020 on the subject of the "defund the police" movement......

After showing clips of masked protesters, smoke on a street and a car on fire, the Abbott ad shows O'Rourke on camera saying: "I really love that Black Lives Matters and other protesters have put this front and center, to defund..." Then the screen cuts to a stylized shot of a man's moving mouth as O'Rourke's voice says, "Completely dismantling those police forces."
But this is not a sentence O'Rourke actually uttered. In fact, the ad deleted two sets of important words, then strung the remaining words together to alter their meaning.

Here's what O'Rourke said. The bolded words are the ones that the ad left out.

"So I really love that Black Lives Matters and other protesters have put this front and center, to defund, you know, these line items that have overmilitarized our police, and instead invest that money in the human capital of your community, make sure that you have the services, the help, the support, the health care necessary to be well and not require police intervention. And then also in some necessary cases, completely dismantling those police forces and rebuilding them."....

CNN asked Bowen if O'Rourke believes that some money should be taken away from police budgets and reallocated to these "other departments" that would handle the work O'Rourke thinks should be taken away from the police.

Bowen said, "That's a false choice. We cannot guarantee the safety of our communities focusing on one or the other, we must do both. We must invest in these additional services so that police departments can focus their resources on preventing and solving crime."

The idiots who started this dumb "defund the police" meme cost Democrats a number of seats in 2020 and now it appears that this stupid slogan may hurt Democrats in 2020
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