True and false claims in Dewhurst campaign ad

By Brad Watson

The pace of campaign commercials is picking up in the race for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate.
 
The frontrunner, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, is airing an ad citing the courage of his father and what must be done by the current generation to cut government spending.
 
But one of the commercial's claims on the condition of the nation's finances is just false.
 
In the ad, Dewhurst talks of his father, who died when Dewhurst was three, and compares their generations.
 
"My dad flew a bomber on D-Day. The greatest generation built the greatest nation on earth," Dewhurst says in the ad.
 
That claim is true. As NBC reported in 2009, Dewhurst and his brother found in a visit to the D-Day Museum in France that their father flew a B-26 on June 6, 1944 over Normandy.
 
In the next claim in the commercial, Dewhurst says: "The next generation spent us into bankruptcy."
 
But in describing how the federal government under the baby boom generation spent too much, Dewhurst's claim is false.
 
Dewhurst's campaign points to government debt — especially under President Obama &mash; that made rapid increases.
 
Indeed, noted economist Robert Lawson, the Fullinwider Chair in Economic Freedom at SMU Cox School of Business, told WFAA "the U.S. is quickly approaching a level that calls into question its ability to honor its obligation to repay the principal and interest owed to bondholders."...