The Vince and Jules of PolitiFact Detractors

Reading Jeff Dyberg’s Bews, News N Vews posts is much easier than Bryan’s dry and detailed Grading PolitiFact or Bashing Blumner blog series. As a Bews (booze) accompaniment, Bryan does twisted pretzels proud while Jeff just goes for simple pretzel sticks with a lot more salt (here's my first post on some of Jeff's commentary). Jeff is so easy, I’m probably only going to do a few more posts on his write-ups, because it’s getting boring already.  One of his particular blog posts stands out, however, because not only does he make his usual feeble, fabricated arguments along with bashing PolitiFact, he uses the post to give free false advertising for Sublime Bloviations.

The subject of Jeff’s post a PolitiFact (PF) ruling on RNC Chairman Michael Steele, where he alleged Obama was a hypocrite when it came to undisclosed foreign campaign contributions:

When President, then candidate, Obama was asked to disclose some of his donors because there was suspicion of their being the foreign source of money into his campaign, they refused to do it. So don't give me this high-and-mighty, holier-than-thou attitude about special interests flooding the political marketplace.

Bryan would call this a classic tu quoque argument (although now that I’ve said this, if he ever reads this, he will disagree just for the sake of disagreeing, and claim it’s some other fallacy). In other words, two wrongs don’t make a right. That certainly doesn’t stop Jeff, but that’s okay, he’s prepared to, in the same way he accused PF, go into *cheerleader* mode to make PolitiFact look like it’s on an underhanded mission to reward Democrats and punish Republicans.

First he turns the question into one of “some of Obama’s donors being foreign” (Steele’s words) into “refusing to disclose anyone at all.” Obama didn’t take any public funding, so he was not subject to audit by the FEC, like McCain. The audits that were done revealed a “smattering” of foreign donors. Jeff gives readers the impression that there were $400 million of secret “foreign” contributions. A smattering is not $400 million, or as the Wall Street Journal termed it, small fish.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Obama did provide a “complete list” to the FEC:

The Federal Election Commission, which did receive a complete list of Obama donors, privately expressed concern that the list might include thousands of other Obama donors it suspected of contributing illegally from foreign countries. The FEC declined to pursue any of these smaller fish. But nothing prevents the White House from releasing the full list of donors it gave the FEC and letting inquiring reporters put the matter to rest once and for all. If Mr. Axelrod believes so deeply in disclosure, he might begin by practicing it at home.

Then he says one of the very reasons Michael Steele even made the statement isn’t an issue, which was the recent Supreme Court decision (Citizens United) that allowed anonymous corporate contributons of unlimited amounts to independent efforts to support a candidate. Basically what conservative court members said wouldn’t happen (remember SCOTUS Judge Alito shaking his head "No" at Obama’s State of the Union Message when Obama brought that up?) started to happen. Jeff blindly and paranoidly suggests that PF just threw it in “to confuse the issue.” But these types of contributions may be far larger than the “smattering” of foreign contributions Obama was alleged to have received; it was a crucial difference that PF pointed to in its analysis:

We think Steele's comment is misleading in the context of responding to Democrats' complaints about tens of millions of dollars anonymously making their way into this election via independent groups like Crosssroads GPS. Steele's comments aren't directly related to that issue.

It should be noted that David Axelrod said something similar to Steele and was rated Barely True. Of course, Jeff might complain that Barely True is PolitiFact’s “disingenuous, misleading and biased” version of False. But if PF’s bias was as exaggerated as Jeff makes it to be, you’d think PF would figure out a way to make Axelrod’s statement more than just Barely True.

This leads to the *best* crock yet  to come from Jeff:

Bryan White over at Sublime Bloviations has been documenting their flawed and misleading ratings for a long time. His site is an invaluable source for exposing the misleading conclusions and flexible standards Politifact employs in their farcical "truth seeking" project.

Really? Well, someone, I won’t say who, started taking a good hard look at all those sublimely bloviating documentations and found that they were so misleading, flawed and of dubious value, she started her own blog to document them.  And strangely, about the same time she’s publishing those findings, right out of the clear blue sky, just like his happening to appear in Facebook comment threads to support Bryan when he is having a tough debate, there’s Jeff Dyberg writing up his own PF analyses similar to Bryan’s. Hmmm.

Jeff has what he calls “Quotes from his fans” on the lead page of his blog, and one of them is mine: I said his Ayn-Randism is nothing more than following a “pulp fiction self-help manual.” But “pulp fiction” reminds me of something relating to this post: Pulp Fiction character Winston Wolf and something he said in assisting the two main characters in the movie who were in trouble when they accidentally shot and killed somebody. I’ll let them figure it out if they ever read this, and only say that Jeff’s pandering loyalty to Bryan is about the same thing, only it seems Jeff hasn’t gotten to what’s beyond the “yet.”