Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) is entitled to his political conclusions. He isn’t entitled to his own version of history. When history complicates the argument, Americans deserve the complicated history — not just the convenient half.
That matters because some of Lieu’s most effective arguments are not built on outright falsehoods. Sometimes the facts are true. The problem is what gets left out.
Lieu recently argued that the war in Iran showed the United States could not “sustain a war, defend our bases or defend our allies,” adding that the flaws came from “years of doing the wrong things, from the first Trump administration to Biden to now.” The readiness concern is legitimate. The timeline is not.
America’s struggle to maintain enough military power for simultaneous crises reaches back decades. After the Cold War, Gen. Colin Powell helped shape the Base Force drawdown. In 1992, while supporting major reductions, Powell warned that calls to go lower or faster were “misguided” because America “could be called tomorrow to face another crisis, somewhere else in the world.”
The Clinton administration then went below the Base Force. Its 1993 Bottom-Up Review reduced planned active-duty strength from about 1.6 million to about 1.4 million while maintaining that the United States needed forces sufficient to fight and win two nearly simultaneous major regional conflicts.
A 1995 Government Accountability Office review documented concerns about whether assumptions behind that two-conflict strategy would work, including shortages involving strategic lift, support forces, and reserve mobilization.
None of this makes former President Bill Clinton responsible for America’s military problems in 2026. George H.W. Bush began the post-Cold War drawdown, and every administration since has shared responsibility. That is precisely the point: This is a decadeslong story. Starting it with the first Trump administration leaves out history directly relevant to Lieu’s argument.
The pattern appears elsewhere. On Aug. 26, Lieu joined Reps. Grace Meng (D-NY) and Judy Chu (D-CA) in condemning calls to incarcerate Chinese Americans during a hypothetical war with China. Their condemnation was justified. But their congressional statement described World War II as involving “more than 120,000 American citizens of Japanese descent.”
That wording is inaccurate. The National Park Service says about two-thirds of the roughly 110,000 people initially removed to War Relocation Authority confinement sites were American citizens, while more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent were incarcerated overall. Correcting the distinction does not diminish the injustice. Historical accuracy does not become optional because the moral argument is correct.
Then there are pardons. On Sept. 4, Lieu promoted his No Pardon Paydays Act by condemning “the perverse practice of paying for Presidential pardons” and saying, “You should not be able to buy your way out of justice.”
Political donations followed by clemency can create serious appearance-of-corruption concerns and deserve investigation. But they do not, by themselves, prove a pardon was purchased. Evidence of an explicit exchange is different from evidence that raises suspicion.
This is not an argument that everything Lieu says is false. Quite the opposite. A half-truth is persuasive precisely because the half being presented may be true.
Lieu is an attorney, former Air Force JAG officer, and retired Reserve colonel. His arguments deserve to be taken seriously. They also deserve to be checked.
Republicans should face the same standard. So should Democrats, presidents, journalists, and writers. If a fact supports your argument, tell it. If another fact materially complicates your argument, tell that one too.
MAMDANI’S LIST STARTS SMALL. HISTORY PROVES WHERE IT ENDS
The question is not merely whether an individual sentence survives a fact-check. It is: Why does important context keep disappearing when that context complicates the political argument?
Lieu is entitled to his political conclusions. Americans are entitled to the other half of the story.
Paul Folsom is a Denver, Colorado resident and U.S. Air Force veteran.