I had no idea this is a thing, but apparently it is.
via Mother Jones
A new rumor is making the rounds—first on Breitbart, then Fox News and beyond—that the Senate’s immigration reform bill contains a provision that could provide free, taxpayer-subsidized cars, scooters, motorcycles, Segways, hovercraft, and god knows what to young Americans. The supposed nationwide government-sponsored “ObamaCar” giveaway would happen during a 15-month period following passage of the legislation.
Shock! Horror!
But wait — it turns out this is even less truthful than the ObamaPhone meme.
“An amendment by [Sen. Bernie] Sanders to the immigration bill would provide a youth jobs program that includes the possibility of transportation and child care services,” PolitiFact notes. “That prompted conservative news outlets to make claims such as, ‘New Immigration bill has taxpayer subsidized Obamacars for youths’…There is no proof to support the idea that the program would include free car, motorcycle or scooter giveaways. In fact, that such a process would end up allowing car giveaways seems laughable.”
A Bush-era program that provides telephone service to poor residents is more of an Obamaphone than a jobs program that may provide access to public transportation is an ObamaCar.
Of course a rigorous fact check will not prevent the existence of ObamaCars from becoming an accepted fact on the far right. I’ll bet the DREAMers who stormed Steve King’s office and had the audacity to charge their Obamaphones left in their ObamaCars.
“One of the things that happened just as soon as they came in that one of them got out their—it may have been an ‘Obama phone’—but their cellphone and plugged it into the wall outlet to charge the battery as if they lived there and paid the rent.”