The Washington Post is fact-checking Rudy Giuliani's recent claims about President Obama: On Fox News, the former New York mayor followed similar comments at a dinner by saying he never hears from the president about "what a great country we are, what an exceptional country we are. When he called us an exceptional country, he said we’re an exceptional country, but so is Greece." Actually, Glenn Kessler finds, Obama talks about how great the US is pretty frequently, and his remarks on Greece were mischaracterized, landing Giuliani a "four Pinocchio" score. That's the Post Fact Checker's maximum, and it denotes "whoppers." Among Obama's comments on the topic:
- Obama's 2004 Democratic National Convention speech helped bring him to the world's attention—and right off the bat, he was praising an exceptional country. "In no other country on Earth is my story even possible," he said, describing the "greatness of our nation."
- During his first run for president: "Let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain.”
- And his second: "We are surely blessed to be citizens of the greatest nation on Earth."
- Here he is last year: "I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions."
- As for those comments on Greece, he was talking about how Greeks feel: "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."
Still, 2016 hopeful Scott Walker
doesn't seem to disagree with Giuliani. (More
Rudy Giuliani stories.)
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