Two Stories That Weren't. Sort of.

Two stories that caught my attention this week turned out to be wrong. Sort of. Both involve confirmation bias of a sort, but I’d argue that I wasn’t a complete idiot to have been deceived.

The first story came out of the Ukrainian city of Donetsk. USA Today reported that Jews in that city of nearly a million residents (and another million in the metropolitan area) had received a leaflet demanding that they “register” with local authorities. Here’s the center of Oren Dorrell’s article:

Jews emerging from a synagogue say they were handed leaflets that ordered the city's Jews to provide a list of property they own and pay a registration fee “or else have their citizenship revoked, face deportation and see their assets confiscated,” reported Ynet News, Israel's largest news website, and Ukraine's Donbass news agency….

The leaflet begins “Dear Ukraine citizens of Jewish nationality” and states that all people of Jewish descent over 16 years old must report to the Commissioner for Nationalities in the Donetsk Regional Administration building and “register.”

It says the reason is because the leaders of the Jewish community of Ukraine supported Bendery Junta, a reference to Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Ukrainian nationalist movement that fought for Ukrainian independence at the end of World War II, “and oppose the pro-Slavic People's Republic of Donetsk,” a name adopted by the militant leadership.

The leaflet then described which documents Jews should provide: “ID and passport are required to register your Jewish religion, religious documents of family members, as well as documents establishing the rights to all real estate property that belongs to you, including vehicles.”

Consequences for non-compliance will result in citizenship being revoked “and you will be forced outside the country with a confiscation of property,” it said. A registration fee of $50 would be required, it said.

The article quotes US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt as calling the leaflets “the real deal,” and Secretary of State John Kerry’s response certainly sounded as if he took the situation seriously. Kerry called the threats “beyond unacceptable” and “grotesque.”

There was a denial on the part of the leader of Donetsk’s pro-Russian movement, Denis Pushilin: he acknowledged the leaflets were published under the name of the organization he heads, but denied any knowledge of their publication or distribution. Still, the situation in Ukraine is anything but stable, and the leaflets aren’t really a whole lot more outrageous than what the Russian government under Vladimir Putin routinely does to gays. Why should it be difficult to believe that a reasonably good-sized splinter group might adopt a different and time-honored bogeyman?

But, for all the seemingly careful sourcing of the article, the situation doesn’t seem to be as dire as we believed. Oh, the leaflets are real enough. But the folks at PolitiFact, who do good research even if their conclusions are often wackadoodly, smelled something fishy. According to their report,

Reporters on the ground quickly found that no one was actually being registered.
PolitiFact exchanged emails with Ari Shapiro, an NPR international correspondent reporting from Donetsk, who said there is a real flier, but it went ignored until the media caught on. Shapiro himself went after the story and shared his reporting with us….
Donetsk chief rabbi Pinchas Vishedski acknowledged the flier’s existence, but called it a provocation, Shapiro reported. U.S. media outlets like Vox and the New Republic have also questioned its validity. A New York Times report from Donetsk said that militants never intended to set up a registry, and the room designated for registering Jews sat empty Thursday.

Even Julia Ioffe’s New Republic article, however, while attributing the story to the “Ukrainian rumor mill,” nonetheless points out the anti-Semitic tendencies by at least some on both sides of the turmoil in eastern Ukraine. She quotes independent Russian journalist Vladimir Fedorin as saying “I think the fliers are fake, but the anti-Maidan crowd is a collection of the hardcore ‘alternative’ variety and criminals, so it’s possible some of them are capable of this.” Indeed, the consensus seems to be that the pamphlets and the masked men who distributed them were, in the words of Abraham H. Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, part of “a series of cynical and politically manipulative uses and accusations of anti-Semitism in Ukraine over the past year.”

In other words, everything about the story is real except the story itself. Anti-semitism exists in a sufficiently significant way—quantitatively and qualitatively—in Ukraine that this kind of stunt could gain traction. And the distribution of the fliers actually happened, and was more than a little creepy. But the people on the ground, foremost among them the overwhelming majority of Donetsk’s Jews, seem pretty much unfazed by the whole affair.

Were Curmie of cynical disposition, he might wonder about the competence of American intelligence forces and/or Secretary Kerry that a little problem was treated like a big one. The press didn’t help, of course, but there’s a difference between a few cranks trying to embarrass the other guy and Holocaust 2.0. It would be nice if the people responsible for knowing the difference actually… you know… knew the difference.

The other story that “got” Curmie this week was a satire piece that seemed credible because yes, those people are that stupid. They just didn’t manifest it in quite this way. Yes, it is true that Texas governor-in-waiting Greg Abbott, whose mental abilities rank somewhere above Louie Gohmert’s and somewhere below those of a butternut squash, does indeed base part of his education policy on the ideas of the even more appallingly moronic Charles Murray.

That would be the Charles Murray who is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “white nationalist,” who argues that it benefits women to be paid less than men, and who said this week that he had found no “evidence” to prove that any woman had been a “significant original thinker in any of the world’s great philosophical traditions.” One would have thought that as a self-described libertarian, he might have found a little room in his pantheon for Ayn Rand, at least, if not for Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, George Eliot, Emma Goldman, Hildegarde von Bingen, Julia Kristeva, Susanne Langer, Rosa Luxemburg, Iris Murdoch, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, or Simone Weil… to name but a few.

But even Murray and Abbott aren’t quite as dim-witted as an article on the satire site Newslo reported. Curmie confesses he skimmed instead of read the article and therefore missed the first “tell”—the line so preposterous that not even a moron could say it with a straight face. Generally, there are at least two per story, so you know something is up with the story when you get to the second one. Missing the first, though, messes up the interpretative process. In this case, that first “tell” was:

“It’s not that I have anything against women. They’re nice enough, but it’s just a physical fact that their brains have developed [notice our tendency to insert “not” into that phrase] to the same degree that men’s brains have developed.

“I’m not a doctor,” he added, “but it may have something to do with their need to develop breasts. The human body can’t do everything.”

And I missed the Newslo banner. Result: I trimmed a couple more IQ points off both Murray and Abbott than they deserved, and trust me, they don’t have a lot to spare. This one is on me, however. I could argue—with reason—that confirmation bias is actually healthy: that treating what some people say with skepticism if not disdain is the only way to survive. Fool me once, blah blah blah. There’s a point at which that’s true, but really, I screwed up. The satire site played by the rules, and I just missed it.

These two stories tell us something about natural skepticism. I actually distrusted the legitimate news story (“legitimate” in the sense of reporting actual facts, however distorted the view might have been) more than the parody piece. I desperately didn’t want to believe it, for one thing, so although I did post a link to the USA Today story on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, I did so with a voice in the back of my head suggesting that there’s more to the story than meets the eye. But I guess the leap from suggesting that there have been no female “significant original thinkers” to asserting that women’s brains are smaller (a well-played homage to the once-prevalent argument concerning racial differences in cranial capacity) just didn’t click as significant. Whether that’s because I’m getting too smug or because yahoos like Abbott and Murray make satire redundant is a tough call.

I’ll try to do better. They won’t.

The Debt and the Deficit Are Different Things

Curmie is no economist, but he is fundamentally honest, often to his detriment in a world overrun by self-aggrandizement, cowardice, and humorlessness.

By the first part of this statement, I do not mean to suggest that I know nothing of economics. I’ve taken only one college level course in economic theory, but that’s one more than most Americans have taken, and whereas I have no idea what a derivative credit default swap is, I do know that manipulation of those little rascals by the reckless and the unscrupulous was a cause of the global financial meltdown of 2008. I know that the idea that banks are “too big to fail” is a hoax propagated by politicians who know the origin of their re-election gravy train (cf. Iceland).

But what Curmie really understands about economics is the basic terminology: terms like deficit and debt, for example. In terms of governmental budgeting, a deficit occurs when, over a specified period of time, usually a fiscal year, more money is being spent than is being collected in revenue. Debt is the accumulated difference between what is owed and what is available. This blog piece is not about whether the debt or deficit ought to be bigger or smaller than they are. Rather, it’s about basic terms and basic honesty.

You see, Gentle Reader, both political parties in this country purport to care a great deal about these things: the fact that neither side really gives a shit about the bottom line, but only about how we get there, is to be ignored for the moment. There are some things about which honest people of all political stripes can agree: the deficit is going down, and the debt is going up. The Wall Street Journal reports that, “For the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, the Congressional Budget Office estimates a deficit of $642 billion, compared with $1.087 trillion a year earlier and the smallest gap since 2008's $458.55 billion shortfall.” In other words, there’s roughly $400 billion less deficit and close to two-thirds of a trillion dollars more debt than a year ago.

And here is where we invoke the second half of Curmie’s self-declaration: the part about being honest. It will come as no surprise to you, Gentle Reader, that leaders on both sides of the aisle are lying through their teeth at every opportunity less than entirely forthright about this whole business. Whether lower deficits and/or debt are intrinsically good things hardly matters: both parties are pretending they are, so the Dems are pretending there’s no problem because the deficit is shrinking, and the GOP is doing their Chicken Little impersonation because the debt is increasing.

That may be more spin than substance on both sides, but at least it’s readily identifiable as political business-as-usual. We started getting into more problematic territory when the usual suspects actually start lying. Needless to say, I wouldn’t be writing this if we didn’t have someone from both sides doing just that.

We start, chronologically, with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), who taped an interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News on August 2 that aired on August 4. Here’s the key section of these remarks: “What we are trying to do is fund the government and make sure also that we take away the kinds of things that are standing in the way of a growing economy, a better health care. And all the while keeping our eye focused on trying to deal with the ultimate problem, which is this growing deficit.” [Both here and below, the emphasis is mine.]

Needless to say, Wallace, good little Fox minion that he is, didn’t correct him. And the incompetent yahoos at PolitiFact even gave him a “Half True” because, you see, although Cantor’s statement is so much equine fecal matter now, current projections are that, absent changes to policy, the deficit will indeed start to increase three years down the road to a point still less than the status quo. The logic—and I use the word loosely—of the PolitiFact idiocracy would similarly suggest that although I am writing this piece at about 11:00 at night, if I say the sun is shining brightly through my window, it’s half true, since it might well be doing so tomorrow afternoon.

No, one of three things is true. I list them here in increasing likelihood of being the correct explanation: 1). It was an honest mistake, a slip of the tongue. 2). Cantor really is so stupid that he doesn’t know the deficit and the debt are different things. 3). He’s lying, and being rather smug about it.

On to third-term Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA), who was pretending to care about veterans attending a discussion of veterans’ affairs in Shreveport. She “corrected” a veteran who expressed concern about the increasing national debt. According to retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Andre E. Dean, “She assured him that the United States did not have an increasing national debt. She then proceeded to tell all of us that for the past six to seven years the federal government had been continuously driving the federal debt down and reducing it, NOT increasing it.”

OK, this is even stupider that Cantor’s comment. For one thing, it’s even less likely to be a slip of the tongue—she was “correcting” a true statement. (Neither Cantor nor Landrieu have, as far as I can tell, admitted a mistake.) But not even the deficit has been falling for “six to seven years.” The biggest deficit was in FY2009, which was… um… four years ago. On the other hand, there’s a less likelihood that Landrieu was consciously lying, because—unlike Cantor—she really is stupider than snake spit, really is utterly inept, and really might not know that “debt” and “deficit” are different things (or that four is less than six, for that matter).

Whose offense was greater? Cantor, who is probably one of the half dozen most important figures in his party and ought to be held to a higher standard, or Landrieu, who apparently belittled a veteran while yammering nonsense that wouldn’t have been accurate even if she hadn’t confused her terms? Cantor, who was talking to a national television audience and should have been prepared to choose his words wisely, or Landrieu, who was picking a fight with a constituent?

I’ve gotta go with Landrieu’s as the more grievous gaffe. It’s OK if you disagree, though, Gentle Reader, because having Eric Cantor as the less mendacious, unethical, incompetent jackass in a scenario takes a little getting used to. But what’s really troubling is that whether the debt and deficit are actual crises, they’re certainly concerns, and the people we’ve got on the job to fix them are folks like these two.

We’re fucked.

PolitiFact Earns Its Own "Pants on Fire"

There was a time not long ago that PolitiFact, the fact-checking project initiated by the St. Petersburg Times, was widely and universally acclaimed. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and might well have deserved it. But that was back in those halcyon days when politicians of both parties at least pretended to care about the truth.

Since then, three things have happened. I suspect they’re not unrelated, although teasing out the causal links is a little more than my feeble brain can handle, at least at present.

• 1. News sources have become increasingly polarized—not partisan, necessarily, but locked into a narrative that is seldom shaken even with facts. The corollary to this point is that an increasing number of Americans get their news from sources that make only token attempts at objectivity (cough… FoxNews… cough).

• 2. Largely because of the Tea Party—the largest ever assemblage of misinformed knuckle-draggers—the lunatic fringe of the Right has become mainstream in the GOP. This isn’t to say that the left is devoid of loonies, but they still tend to be thought of as outsiders. There is no liberal counterpart to Glenn Beck, to Michele Bachmann, to Louis Gohmert. Are there progressives that stupid and that crazy? Sure. But they don’t get the platforms of their right-wing brethren.

• 3. It’s become Amateur Hour at PolitiFact. Despite great bluster and pseudo-solemnity from the PF muckety-mucks, it is certainly true that they apply different standards to different claims. I talked about this phenomenon in June, wondering “when PolitiFact got into the implications business. They sometimes consider a statement based on its literal truth, sometimes (apparently) on what someone might think it implies. Sometimes they give a speaker the benefit of the doubt as to what s/he might have meant….”

In April, I somewhat presciently called attention to what I called a “particularly inept” analysis of claims that the Paul Ryan budget plan would “eliminate Medicare.”

Why “prescient,” you ask? Well, the incompetent, misleading, illogical pronouncement that Democratic claims about the Ryan plan merited a “Pants on Fire” rating (to be fair, the ads weren’t exactly above reproach) served as the foundation for declaring those Democratic assertions the “Lie of the Year” for 2011. I call Bullshit.

There are several parts to this story. Let’s start with the original analysis itself. PolitiFact “rulings” (yes, that’s their term for it—they take themselves, if not their work, very seriously) tend to be anonymous. This one is. The author, whoever he or she may be, grants that the Ryan plan would be “a huge change” and “a dramatic change of course,” and that “seniors would have to pay more for their health plans if it becomes law.” But s/he takes issue with the characterization of “ending” Medicare, calling it “a major exaggeration.” This is interesting terminology, by the way, because even if true this wouldn’t qualify for “Pants on Fire” status, let alone “Lie of the Year.”

The PF Pundit (let’s call him/her something non-gender specific, like “Moe,” which could be short for Maurice or Maureen, and has the advantage of identifying the writer as a Stooge… no offense to my friend Mo—no “e”—who is anything but stupid) sniffs that “Democrats, including Obama, have said the plan would end Medicare ‘as we know it,’ a critical qualifier. But the 30-second ad from the DCCC makes a sweeping claim without that important qualifier.” So we’re basing the decision for Lie of the Year not on an actual lie repeated ad nauseum (e.g., “The economic stimulus created ‘zero jobs.’”).

No, Moe—and Moe’s masters—decided that a single, arguably accurate, statement in a single web ad ought to be the centerpiece for our collective indignation. (Be it noted, other Democrats have echoed the claim, but nowhere near to the extent of all the “failed stimulus” crap that passes for objective analysis in the corporate media. And the original article takes issue only with a single web ad.) Let’s face it, if the concession that Democrats in general aren’t really making the “exaggerated” claim isn’t enough, then the fact that under the Ryan plan Medicare would pay for only 32% of seniors’ health-care costs by 2030 (and get worse from there) isn’t going to matter to ol’ Moe. By the way, the link I provided here isn’t to some commie pinko website; it’s to the official report of the Congressional Budget Office.

Moe then whinges that the DCCC ad in question “claims that participants would have to find $12,500 to pay for Medicare.” Two points. First, Moe, if you’re going to get all pissy about minor details of accuracy, you might notice that the ad says “health care,” not Medicare. The Dems are saying the GOP is ending Medicare, remember? Really, Moe, try to keep up. Secondly, the claim is absolutely, unequivocally, factually true. Nowhere in the ad is there any claim that seniors will have to spend $12,500 more. If I’m contemplating buying a new house and tell my friend that I’m worried about finding $1700 a month in mortgage payments, I shouldn’t have to footnote my remarks by saying that I’m already paying half of that. Moe’s argument is unadulterated bovine feces.

Ah, but Moe isn’t done: “Still another problem with the ad involves who’s immediately affected by the Republican proposal. In one scene, the ad shows a senior citizen pushing a walker behind a lawn mower. A teenager looking on eats an apple and says, ‘You missed a spot.’ In reality, people 55 and older won’t see changes under the Ryan plan.” Seriously, Moe? That’s what you’ve got? Perhaps, just perhaps, the scene in the ad is intended to take place in a (thank God) fictional future… when people a couple of years younger than I (my wife, for example) are trying to figure out how to stay alive because Paul Ryan won’t tax his fatcat friends at the rate they paid under the sainted Reagan. Indeed, the entire ad can be taken as representing a “what would happen if…” scenario. No one believes the spot represents a literal representation of the present. I understand, Moe, that you can’t comprehend that line of reasoning. It requires the barest sliver of imagination, a quality that you and your masters evidently lack. Sorry, hallucinations don’t count.

Finally, there’s the utterly ridiculous claim that when the Republicans voted to end Medicare (as we know it), they didn’t really vote to end Medicare because it was a non-binding resolution. Moe, you crack me up. Seriously, that one idiot pseudo-journalist can go through this many contortions to justify an utterly absurd conclusion is really amusing. Or at least it would be if your organization didn’t have a little residual credibility: enough so that someone somewhere might think you have the integrity of snake-oil salesmen and/or intellectual superiority to a watermelon. We get it, they didn’t end Medicare. But that little dog and pony show they staged sure as hell included a vote on “a budget” (your description, Moe, not mine), and they sure as hell did vote as pretty little lockstep drones to radically reduce medical coverage for people who have been paying taxes for years.

Had it been a “real vote,” and been shot down in the Senate or vetoed by a President who’s pretty inept but not that brain-meltingly stupid, the pragmatic effect would have been precisely the same. Not sure if that would have satisfied Moe, however. And this, of course, is only the first salvo in the Republicans’ attacks on everyone not rich enough, scared enough, or stupid enough to sign on to their greed- and paranoia-induced assault on every social program that doesn’t benefit primarily those who don’t need the help.

Fast forward a few months. PolitiFact, as usual, announces its “Lie of the Year” voting. For at least two years in a row, the site’s viewers and editors/staff selected the same contender. In 2009, it was “Death panels,” capturing an impressive 61% of the vote against some pretty good competition (the birthers, for example). Last year, the readers and editors alike selected “A government takeover of health care,” with 44% of the readers’ votes, again against some pretty good whoppers (my personal favorite, that “94 percent of small businesses will face higher taxes under the Democrats' plan”—the actual number is under 3%—came in fourth).

This year’s finalists, in addition to the eventual winner:

• “President Obama ‘went around the world and apologized for America.’”

• “The Obama administration's review of obsolete regulations was ‘unprecedented.’”

• “The vaccine to prevent HPV can cause mental retardation.”

• “Abortion services are ‘well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.’” [this absurd claim by Jon Kyl was the actual subject of my April piece, linked above; this one, by the way, got my vote]

• “Because of more restrictive voting laws, Republicans ‘want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws.’”

• “Scientists are ‘questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. … (It is) more and more being put into question.’”

• “Congressional Republicans have introduced dozens of bills on social issues and other topics, but ‘zero on job creation.’”

• “The economic stimulus created ‘zero jobs.’” [You didn’t think I’d pulled that example I used earlier out of thin air, did you, Gentle Reader?]

• “I didn't raise taxes once.” (President Obama)

A decent enough list, although some are merely poor choices of phrasing, others are pretty much insignificant, and others are so preposterous that no rational person would believe them (which after all, is what keeps Michele Bachmann at least marginally amusing instead of terrifying).

Two things out of the ordinary happened when the finalists were announced. First, the leftie blogosphere lit up about the stupidity of including a “100% True” statement as a contender for “Lie of the Year.” CrooksandLiars’ Susie Madrak wrote, “Capping costs to beneficiaries, closing the traditional fee-for-service program, and forcing seniors to enroll in new private coverage, ends Medicare by eliminating everything that has defined the program for the last 46 years.” In other words, “ending Medicare” isn’t far off the mark. At the very least, it falls under the category of unexceptional political hyperbole which, for example, declares the current President a socialist.

Secondly, Paul Ryan started soliciting supporters to stuff the ballot box, as it were, encouraging them to “Help me fight the lies, falsehoods, and attacks of the Left by casting a vote to show the Democrat’s lie that Republicans voted to ‘end Medicare’ is the worst political lie of 2011.”

Despite this anti-democratic (and anti-Democratic) maneuver, however, the actual readers of PolitiFact prevailed, and the “killing Medicare” claim came in only third, behind the “zero jobs” claim and the ridiculous distortion of Planned Parenthood’s priorities. So far, so good.

But, as you know, the editors over-rode the readers. This is troubling for a variety of reasons, not least because Bill Adair and Angie Drobnic Holan (they have names!) admit that even conservative think-tankers like Norman Ornstein agree that a slight tweak to the language of a handful of progressives would satisfy even him. Adair and Holan proceed to note that

At times, Democrats and liberal groups were careful to characterize the Republican plan more accurately. Another claim in the ad from the Agenda Project said the plan would “privatize” Medicare, which received a Mostly True rating from PolitiFact. President Barack Obama was also more precise with his words, saying the Medicare proposal “would voucherize the program and you potentially have senior citizens paying $6,000 more.”

In other words, even though more incendiary language has been employed, the de facto leader of Democrats wasn’t the one to do so.

Ah, but, quoth the PF morons, “more often, Democrats and liberals overreached.” More often? Evidence, please. You’re supposed to be freaking journalists. If your claim is true, back it up. If it isn’t, then, to steal a line I saw posted on Facebook today, off is the general direction in which I wish you would fuck. Adair and Holan then proceed to run through the same tired and unconvincing litany employed by our friend Moe in the original post. Oh, and they point out that other self-appointed incompetents “fact checkers” agree with them. Trouble is, they’re still wrong.

Steve Benen sums up the argument this way:

I’ve been trying to think of the best analogy for this. How about this one: imagine someone owns a Ferrari. It’s expensive and drives beautifully, and the owner desperately wants to keep his car intact. Now imagine I took the car away, removed the metallic badge off the trunk that says “Ferrari,” I stuck it on a golf cart, and I handed the owner the keys.

“Where’s my Ferrari?” the owner would ask.

“It’s right here,” I’d respond. “This has four wheels, a steering wheel, and pedals, and it says ‘Ferrari’ right there on the back.”

By PolitiFact’s reasoning, I haven’t actually replaced the car — and if you disagree, you’re a pants-on-fire liar.

Not bad. Medicare is more of a Toyota, and the Ryan plan a Yugo for the price of a Cadillac, but the point is still pretty clear.

Interestingly, Mark Hemingway at The Weekly Standard agrees:

Truthfully, the notion that Paul Ryan's plan will “end Medicare as we know it” is a fair assessment. The idea it flatly “ends Medicare” might be a bit too reductive, as there will still obviously be a federal program to help seniors get medical coverage and those currently over a certain age will be guaranteed to get Medicare as we know it. But broadly, I don't think it's a lie. In fact, “ending Medicare as we know it” is a good thing. The program is over $30 trillion in debt. Any politician who tells you that that they can preserve the program as it is and still get costs under control is probably lying to you. And I think Paul Ryan has basically been open about the fact that the status quo in Medicare must change.

See what he did, there? He calls the Dems’ claim “a bit too reductive,” then argues why Medicare as we know it should end. We can agree or disagree with his opinion (I personally think there should be some tightening of the belt in Medicare, but it is hardly the first place I’d go to reduce the federal deficit), but it is honest and thoughtful: two things PolitiFact is not.

The howling on the left, therefore, may be a trifle overwrought, but it is not without legitimacy. Paul Krugman, who I venture to say knows more about economic structures than Adair, Holan, Moe and me combined, agrees. He also writes that:

... the people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there’s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they’ve bent over backwards to appear ‘balanced’—and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.

I’m not as ready as Mr. Krugman to ascribe motives to PolitiFact’s inane choice. There’s nothing inherently political about their decision—utterly unjustified, yes, but not necessarily political. Fact is, they’re just inept. An earlier piece by Hemingway, written just before instead of just after PolitiFact’s big announcement, demonstrates pretty clearly that they’re just as inept at criticizing the right as they are the left.

PolitiFact’s problem is that they started to believe their own press clippings. They got lazy, smug, and arrogant. They substituted sloth for research, acquiescence for skepticism, petulant defensiveness for argumentation. They aren’t fact-checkers at all—fact-checkers would understand that the denotative and connotative accuracy of a statement are often radically different. They would understand that an argument can be literally true but ultimately irrelevant: but that doesn’t make it anything less than true. They would understand that there’s a continuum between fact and opinion, and that the latter is almost always going to come into play: and the way to deal with that is to acknowledge it rather than pretend to a fallacious pseudo-objectivity. They would, in short, not be PolitiFact.

Did PolitiFact render themselves “useless and irrelevant”? Yes. But that, of course, is only my opinion.

More Politi than Fact

The fact-checkers at PolitiFact usually do a pretty good job of analysis. Their ultimate verdicts, though, on their cutesy “Truth-o-Meter”—True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True, False and Pants on Fire—seem rather too whimsically applied… not to mention that they are described on the site as “rulings”, rather than opinions or decisions: these people take themselves very seriously. One could but wish they were as serious about the work.

A few days ago, they analyzed Jon Stewart’s rhetorical question of Fox News’s Chris Wallace, “Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers? … Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.” PolitiFact gave that statement a “False,” and then proceeded to describe how Fox viewers, though pretty damned ignorant, aren’t quite as uninformed (a different thing, not in fact tested by PolitiFact’s purported evidentiary polls) as some others. So Stewart’s claim regarding Fox’s peculiar brand of mendacity is not, in fact, demonstrated by “every poll”: just by the all the relevant ones.

Chris Mooney makes this point specifically and emphatically at Desmogblog.com:

My research, and my recent post, most emphatically supports this statement. Indeed, I cited five (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) separate public opinion studies in support of it—although I carefully noted that these studies do not prove causation (e.g., that watching Fox News causes one to be more misinformed). The causal arrow could very well run the other way—believing wrong things could make one more likely to watch Fox News in the first place.

But the fundamental point is, when it comes to believing political misinformation and watching Fox News, I know of no other studies than these five—though I’d be glad to see additional studies produced. Until then, these five all point in one obvious direction.

“Every poll,” to quote Stewart.

PolitiFact readers tend to be a pretty savvy lot—not universally, of course, but generally—and they pretty well let the site have it for its sloppiness. The key, as both Mooney and a plethora of commenters on PolitiFact site and Facebook page noted, is that Stewart’s claim can’t be measured by whether a respondent can name the Secretary of State, but by whether s/he thinks, contrary to all evidence, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, that climate change is a fraud, or that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

I cite here a small handful of the earliest comments, all of which have more to offer than whoever came up with PolitiFact’s irrelevant analysis:

• Kona Lowell: “Politifact seems to be intentionally misunderstanding. Fox viewers, according to Pew, tend to believe things that are untrue by wide margins. It doesn't mean they don't know who is president.”

• Andrew Bacon: “‎‎91 percent believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs. 72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit. 72 percent believe the economy is getting worse. 60 percent believe climate change is not occurring. 49 percent believe income taxes have gone up. 63 percent believe the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts. 56 percent believe Obama initiated the GM/Chrysler bailout. 38 percent believe that most Republicans opposed TARP. 63 percent believe that Obama was not born in the U.S. (or that it is unclear).

• Jeff Ferguson: “I think you guys kind of missed the point of his comment. When he says constantly misinformed, he isn't referring to the type of historical or even current trivia that the Pew studies requested during the polls, but instead things like ‘will the new health care laws require death panels’ and so forth. He wasn’t shooting for a measure of intelligence, because just watching Fox doesn’t necessarily make you stupid, but instead, that the viewers of that show would simply be misinformed about key issues.”

• Jimmy Rumple: “Politifact screwed this one up by not knowing, or ignoring, basic definitions. Stewart said ‘misinformed,’ not ‘uninformed.’ Politifact didn't check for the right thing.”

• Manuel Somohano: “Seriously PolitiFact? Seriously? Are you trying to be ‘fair and balanced now’?......”

In fact, PolitiFact took such a pounding from its own readers that staff writer Louis Jacobson had to be trotted out to… well, I’m not sure exactly what he was doing. Acknowledging the fact that the readers really thought the evidence adduced by PF was insufficient to claim Stewart’s remarks are false, yes. Making the case for the relevance of the evidence, no. Taking responsibility for the laziness of the research and the shoddiness of the analysis (N.B., PolitiFact cites not a single one of the actually relevant polls referenced by Mooney), absolutely not. Mostly… well, mostly it was repeating what had already been written as if that made a difference.

The Stewart fiasco, however, was simply a warm-up act. The real fun came yesterday, when Obama advisor David Axelrod is quoted as saying, “If you're Governor [Mitt] Romney and you say I'm going to turn this economy around, I've got the answers. You don't offer them. Then people have a right to say, why is it that your state was 47th in the country in job creation when you were governor?” PolitiFact then checked out the claim, verified it, linked to a confirming article from that socialist rag, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, and then… get this… declared Axelrod’s claim only “Half True,” anyway.

The pinhead (anonymous) reporter, you see, presumes to know what Axelrod intended to imply, deciding without benefit of evidence that Axelrod was claiming that Romney was responsible for the weak job growth: “some may interpret the Democrats' statistic that Romney is to blame….” Axelrod didn’t say it, and while that may have been what he was hinting at, I frankly doubt it.

What Axelrod, who after all is a senior advisor to President Obama, not a pundit or an elected official himself, is saying is in fact quite the opposite of what the PolitiFact Cretin interpolates. Axelrod knows very well that the economy is not subservient to the will of the Chief Executive, whether that’s the president of the country or the governor of a state. It was Romney, not Axelrod, who suggested otherwise, blaming Obama for the less-than-robust recovery and saying he could do better. Well, Mr. Romney, you had your chance and you blew it big time. So either the present economy isn’t necessarily Obama’s fault (in which case you’ve got nothing to run against) or you bear primary responsibility for the sluggishness in Massachusetts during your tenure as governor, so your allegedly brilliant economic scheme has been proven not to work. Pick one. Axelrod didn’t say it was Romney’s fault; he didn’t imply it. What he did imply, and was right to do so, is that Romney can’t have it both ways.

I’m not exactly sure when PolitiFact got into the implications business. They sometimes consider a statement based on its literal truth, sometimes (apparently) on what someone might think it implies. Sometimes they give a speaker the benefit of the doubt as to what s/he might have meant, e.g., Newt Gingrich’s claim that “The Reagan recovery, which I participated in passing, in seven years created for this current economy the equivalent of 25 million new jobs, raised federal revenue by $800 billion a year in terms of the current economy, and clearly it worked. It's a historic fact.” (Note: PolitiFact radically misinterprets Gingrich’s comment in their headline, suggesting the Reagan policy would have already created all those jobs: even Gingrich isn’t that absurd.) PolitiFact mentions in passing that Reagan’s policies might not have been responsible for the recovery (Cf. the Massachusetts economy not being Romney’s fault), but then proceeds to ignore its own statement.

More to the point, both halves of Gingrich’s assertion are wrong. PolitiFact goes through some arithmetic contortions to achieve a number close to the 25 million jobs figure cited by Gingrich. Of course, he didn’t say “nearly” or “approximately.” Moreover, PolitiFact cherry-picks the numbers they use to fact-check: notice that they start two full years into the Reagan presidency. At the same point in the Reagan presidency we’re currently at in the Obama presidency, June of the third year, unemployment was at 10% and 1.1 million jobs had been added since the low-water mark in employment. Today, unemployment is at 9.1% and about 2.1 million private sector jobs have been created since the “trough.” See how brilliant Reagan was? More to the point, recoveries need to build momentum. It is unreasonable to expect the beginning of an upturn (where we still are now) to generate the same number of new jobs as even the average months once a rebound has hit its stride. In other words, Gingrich’s figure here is mostly true and mostly irrelevant (as opposed to Axelrod's entirely true and partially irrelevant riposte).

PolitiFact itself exposes the silliness of the second half of Gingrich’s claim: coming up with a total of $188 billion, not $800 billion. (Apparently Gingrich is now claiming to have misspoken, intending to argue the $800 billion figure applied over the life of the recovery, not in a single year. Perhaps so—people do misspeak—or perhaps he was lying and got busted.)

What’s remarkable here is that Gingrich’s almost true and completely uncontextualized first half and totally false second half—both of which must be true to make the statement true—still merits a “Half True” from PolitiFact. Yes, precisely the same rating as the demonstrably true, no argument, statistic cited by Axelrod.

The upshot of this is simple: PolitiFact is still a useful tool in determining whether a candidate, office-holder, or pundit is really telling the truth. But those halcyon days when it could savor its reputation as a thorough, reliable, and objective source—a place where a glance at the final “ruling” would resolve a question of fact—those days are gone, and they ain’t coming back.

Jon Kyl Will Never Learn, But We Should

Like most of his Senate colleagues (on both sides of the aisle, but especially on his), Jon Kyl is renowned for neither intellectual acuity nor fundamental honesty. He outdid himself recently, however, with his claim that abortions are “well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does.” It is a preposterous claim, even for someone as dim-witted and truth-impaired as Mr. Kyl, but it’s not really the fact that a GOP politician simply made stuff up that interests me: that’s a dog bites man story.

Besides, the left’s response hasn’t been exactly without its faults. PolitiFact, which has been hit-and-miss of late (their analysis of claims that the Ryan budget plan would eliminate Medicare was particularly inept) got this one right… well, almost. In giving Kyl only a “false” rating instead of the more severe and, in this case accurate, “Pants on Fire,” PolitiFact allowed Kyl’s acknowledgment that he’d been busted to soften the blow. (Here’s a good analysis of that part of the story by David Brauer.)

But while PolitiFact may have been a little easy on Kyl, their skepticism of assertions on the left that actually only 3% of what Planned Parenthood “does” is abortions was appropriate. They’re right in pointing out that the only numbers we have are in the form of self-reporting (not that cooking the books ever happens on our side), and that there’s a fundamental difference between “providing an abortion and, say, handing out a pack of condoms or conducting a blood test.” And, of course, the argument that Planned Parenthood uses no federal funds for abortion services is as dubious as similar claims from the US Chamber of Commerce that no foreign corporate money finds its way into campaign ads.

That said, the “contraception” category includes “reversible contraception, emergency contraception, vasectomies and tubal sterilizations.” This would seem to include a fair number of surgical procedures on the scale of an abortion, and, given the fact that there are 12 times as many of them (!) as there are abortions, Kyl’s fantasy number gets obliterated. In other words, if Planned Parenthood were dishonest enough to quadruple the actual number of such procedures and under-report the number of abortions it actually performs by a factor of 10, abortions would still make up far less than Kyl’s 90% figure, just among surgical procedures, not even counting the over 3 million cancer screens, pregnancy tests, etc., that really form the center of the organization’s mission.

So Kyl was either lying or hopelessly deluded. Given the source, it’s hard to tell which: he’s so adept at both. As noted above, a politician of any stripe who says something untrue, even absurdly untrue, isn’t really news. But in the finest tradition of incompetents everywhere, Kyl took things a step further. His minion told CNN that “his remark was not intended to be a factual statement, but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, an organization that receives millions in taxpayer dollars, does subsidize abortions.” Needless to say, this remarkably stupid comment garnered even more criticism than the Senator’s initial idiocy. After all, if Kyl had meant to say that, he presumably would have done so. Stephen Colbert, in particular, had a field day, not only launching his own parodic attack on air, but also engendering the Twitter tag NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement.

Kyl, of course, as cravenly pompous as he is dishonest, responded by claiming he “misspoke” and by throwing the staffer under the bus: “that was not me—that was my press person,” quoth the ethical paragon. Way to stay classy, Jon Boy. By the way, Senator, was your statement intended to be factual? Because if it was, you kind of missed the mark… like aiming for Phoenix and hitting Tierra del Fuego.

Of course, what’s interesting here is that the staffer’s comment was about the only thing anyone in that office has ever said that’s actually true. Senator Kyl’s statement was not intended to be factual. Jon Kyl has the intellectual rigor of a kumquat, but even he knew he wasn’t telling the truth. But—and I say this as a theatre professional trained in the art of the hypokrites—he absolutely intended to make us believe that he was telling the truth (a point made in passing by Colbert). This wasn’t garden variety political hyperbole, saying “millions” to mean “a lot.” It was, quite simply, a lie. And Jon Kyl was too stupid to know he’d get caught.

Needless to say, the press agent fell on his sword, having tried in vain to cover up his boss’s prevarication: “Senator Kyl misspoke when he incorrectly cited a statistic on the Senate floor last week regarding Planned Parenthood…. Rather than simply state that in response to a media inquiry, I responded that his comment was not intended to be a factual statement; a comment that, in retrospect, made no sense. Senator Kyl neither saw nor approved that response.” Best line of this round of the brouhaha goes to Alex Seitz-Wald of Thinkprogress.org: “So neither Kyl’s original statement nor his press aide’s refutation of it were intended to be factual statements.”

You, Gentle Reader, would think that even a dull knife like Jon Kyl would have figured out that the best thing to do next would be to shut up and let the storm blow over. In such a surmise, however, you would be seriously under-estimating the good Senator’s unparalleled capacity for shooting himself in the foot (should this ever become an Olympic event—it would certainly be more interesting than race-walking or rhythmic gymnastics—we’d be assured of a medalist). No, Mr. Kyl decided instead to do his best Wile E. Coyote impression, and… wait for it… have his inanity stricken from the Congressional Record.

There was a time, not all that long ago, when such a ploy would have made a certain amount of sense: not ethically, of course, but at least politically. But that was before C-Span, before YouTube, and before bloggers. I suspect that Charles Wagner’s comment on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page is accurate: “Congresscritters of both parties regularly expunge their gaffes from the Congressional Record. This is not new.” Certainly I’m not arguing otherwise. But it takes a remarkably tone-deaf politician not to know that someone is going to check the official record to see if it’s really an accurate transcript of what transpired on the Senate floor. Nor will anyone suddenly forget the existence of video recordings of the debate.

No, what Senator Kyl has done creates a three-fold calamity: 1). it reminds us all, once again, of the mendacious initial claim, and of the gargantuan quality of that lie, 2). it suggests rather clearly that Senator Kyl, at least, and probably a goodly number of his colleagues, have no idea what media are available to those of even modest technological savvy (why bother, if it’s not going to work?), and 3). most problematically, it calls into question the trust we place in the Congressional Record, making it clear that accuracy (truth, if you will) is always to be sacrificed to an individual Congressperson’s desire to avoid embarrassment.

Come to think of it, though, that last manifestation isn’t so bad: it increases an already rife cynicism, but such a stance would seem to be appropriate. Better to know that we’re being manipulated than to have it happening without our knowledge. So… uh… thanks for being an incompetent charlatan, Senator. We appreciate the lesson you’ve taught us.

Madison ≠ Cairo

I’ve been reading a lot about events in Wisconsin lately. What is clear is that Governor Scott Walker is making a concerted effort to economize by reducing the overall pay packages of state workers, from teachers to prison guards to nurses at public hospitals. That’s about as much as we can say with certainty. But both the left and the right want to talk about recent events in Cairo.

From the left, Michael Moore tweets that “Madison is the new Cairo! Wisconsin teachers, nurses, firefighters—shut the state down! All of working America is with u!” AlterNet’s Rose Aguilar wonders “Is Wisconsin Our Egypt?” and cites a high school senior in the affirmative. Alex Moore sniffs on the Death and Taxes site that “Where Madison became like Cairo was when, at the behest of Governor Scott Walker, Wisconsin turned into a police state threatening force against citizens and lawmakers alike.”

From the right, Rep. Paul Ryan complains that Walker’s “basically saying ‘I want you public workers to pay half of what our private sector counterparts’ and he's getting riots—it's like Cairo has moved to Madison these days.” Right-wing commentators like Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin were quick to pick up on Moore’s tweet and try to use it to enflame their own base.

The left would like to envision the protesters as some sort of freedom fighters struggling valiantly to prevail against a brutal and oppressive regime. There are protest signs reading:

Hosni Walker
WI Dictator
Must Go

The right is more concerned with a false sense of law and order. To them, any protest, no matter how restrained or non-violent (unless, of course, orchestrated by the Koch brothers or their minions) is, by definition, a riot. The idea that thousands of people would object to being asked to shoulder what they believe to be a disproportionate load of so-called austerity measures while fat-cats get more tax breaks: this is heading into dangerous mob territory in the eyes of the GOP. There are reports, apparently accurate, that state police were dispatched to round up the Democratic lawmakers who were boycotting the legislative session in order to prevent, or at least delay, passage of Governor Walker’s cost-cutting measure. Maybe it’s just me, but that doesn’t strike me as a particularly appropriate use of tax-payer money, especially during a budget crunch, even if the representatives in question were behaving petulantly at best.

The bottom line: to both sides, I say the following: Shut up. Madison isn’t Cairo.

Wisconsin State Journal cartoonist Phil Hands (that’s his cartoon at the top of this entry) has it right:

I'm sorry, but Walker is not a despot or a dictator. He, and the rest of the republican clowns serving at the State Capital were elected, by a wide margin, by the people of Wisconsin. I find it ironic that the same day that thousands of people skipped work to rail against our “undemocratic” leader, fewer than a quarter of the registered voters in Madison bothered to vote in an actual election.

Preach it, Phil.

There has been some good reporting from PolitiFact Wisconsin on many of the disputed issues here. Supporting the Governor’s position are their findings that claims by progressive pundits Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow were “false”: Schultz for exaggerating the extent of the proposed cuts, Maddow for not “reading the fine print” and suggesting there’s really no budgetary crisis at all.

Moreover, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee’s claim that Gov. Walker had threatened to call out the National Guard if state employees protested his cuts earned a “Pants on Fire,” PolitiFact’s harshest rating, reserved for actual lies as opposed to mere untruths. The AFL-CIO ad that says that Walker’s bill would, “for thousands of teachers, nurses, and other trusted public employees… take away any say they have in the workplace” rated a “Half True.”

That said, the liberals fared better than the conservatives on the Truth-o-Meter. Representative Ryan’s claim about riots earned a “Pants on Fire.” State Senator Alberta Darling’s claim that “collective bargaining deal[ing] only with wages… is how it is, for the most part, in the private sector” was declared “False.” The Club for Growth’s claim that “state workers haven’t had to sacrifice” received a frankly rather generous “Barely True.” And the governor himself merited a “False” for offering the false option of “look[ing] at 1,500 layoffs of state employees or close to 200,000 children who would be bumped off Medicaid-related programs” (given the fact that he couldn’t have done that, legally, if he wanted to) and a “Pants on Fire” for spewing the absurd notion that “civil service protections” would “remain fully intact” under his proposal. In short, there’s a fair amount of disinformation out there: neither side has covered itself in glory here. One could I suppose, make the case that the Republicans are probably a little more egregious, given the fact that a good deal of their outrageousness stems from political leaders rather than pundits, but forgive me if I don’t find “we lied less than they did” a compelling rallying cry for Democrats.

The purpose of this piece isn’t to take sides on the debate—besides, if you read my stuff with any regularity, you already know where I stand. State employees do get excellent, union-negotiated, benefits that are probably better than those of most of their counterparts in the private sector. But I have seen no refutation of the claims that state workers in Wisconsin actually get lower salaries than private sector employees with equivalent education, or that their salaries are in fact lower than those of state workers in neighboring states. Still, this doesn’t make state employees exempt from having to shoulder some of the burden of what appears to be a real budgetary shortfall.

Ultimately, state workers have a right to be upset, even angry. If, as some have suggested, Governor Walker gave misleading indications of his budgetary intentions in order to get elected, then those who voted for him can rightly feel a little betrayed. The protesters aren’t a mob, and there is little indication of even minor violence, although President Obama’s recent call for civility of discourse has often gone unheeded by his political allies.

But a pay cut isn’t repression (I say this as a state employee whose next contract may well show a pay cut), and Walker is a duly elected official, not a dictator. Is he a hypocrite? Almost certainly. Corrupt? Possibly. Would I vote for him? Never. But he isn’t Hitler. He isn’t even Mubarak. In fact, he isn’t even close, Chicken Little’s testimony to the contrary notwithstanding.