In Thusday night’s debate, Barack Obama said:
First ABC’s Jake Tapper talked to the captain to verify his story. He found the captain credible and gave the all clear, despite the fact that the captain told him that there was no ammunition shortage in Afghanistan. NBC also spoke with the captain, but they weren’t quite so quick to declare the case open and shut:
Obama had claimed that U.S. forces didn’t have ammunition for their fight against the Taliban as a consequence of the war in Iraq. There is no evidence that this is the case. Furthermore, U.S. troops weren’t capturing Taliban weapons “because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief.” They had a broken gun and they temporarily replaced it with a weapon that had already been captured. Big difference. And you know what…if Obama had misremembered this story because he’d spoken with the captain so long ago, it might not be such a big deal. But Obama had never spoken with the captain. His staff had. And so Obama mangled the story. As an aside, the only other person who’s weighed in to support Obama’s claims is Phillip Carter. Talking Points Memo, Andrew Sullivan, and others link to Carter as though he’s some kind of authority on the subject. He may be, but he’s also “doing some work for the Obama campaign,” a fact that Obama’s supporters in the blogosphere seem all too happy to ignore. Update: Carter is on Obama’s Veterans Policy Committee. Shouldn’t TPM note that when the quote Carter as saying Obama’s story is “eminently believable“?
