Lil White Lies: Parlaying PolitiFact

Sometimes I get the impression that my conservative counterpart is downright desperate in his search for finding anything, ANYTHING that he can relegate to the “Politi-Flubs” category on his blog and can be magnified colossally out of proportion. I’ve even seen other Facebook commenters suggest, as I did some time ago, that Bryan was a disgruntled ex-employee of the Tampa Bay (formerly St. Petersburg) Times because of his relentless, unforgiving mission to discredit PolitiFact.

Here we have one more example of his making a mountain out of a molehill on a recent PolitiFact (PF) ruling on John Stemberger, beginning with this comment on Facebook, along with a blog post fleshing out this formula: 

Is PolitiFact for real?

X makes statement S.

Y quotes statement S, attributing it to X.

PolitiFact rates statement S, applies the rating to Y.

I looked it all over and composed this lengthy post in response at PolitiFact’s Facebook page:

While I can understand what Bryan White is trying to convey with his algebraic approach, I’m not totally persuaded by his conclusion that it’s a flub (as he stated in his blog). The link to the conservative Florida Family Policy Council Blog has an article which says right at the top it is “by John Stemberger.” He is a known Conservative. The fellow Stemberger quotes, Wayne Grudem, is an evangelical Christian , and if you read the reviews of the book which contains the quote Stemberger is using, it appears he is a Michele Bachman-type Conservative as well (“Grudem's theology can be located near the most conservative end of the theological spectrum”…” He consciously avoids interaction with non-conservative sources…” ). The question becomes who should PF Florida name as the person they are ruling on….should it be Stemberger, the blog itself or Grudem? Often PF asks for sources: does this mean when the person names their source (whether from a direct statement or in something they published), PF is obliged to rule on the source instead? Stemberger is listed in the PF ruling as being one of the 35 sources, having been interviewed November 10-17. I don’t know if that means there were multiple interviews with him during that time period, so is it possible they told him he was being ruled on, and/or he agreed to it?

PF Florida could have said conservative blogger “John Stemberger” (as it did) or a post in a conservative blog “Florida Family Policy Council” (as authored in the title by John Stemberger) or conservative Evangelical “writer Wayne Grudem” (as quoted in conservative blog Florida Family Policy Council by conservative blogger John Stemberger). Which one should it be, how important is the distinction?

And of course, we have the damned if PF does, damned if PF doesn’t scenario popping up as well. If PF Florida made the ruling on Wayne Grudem (as quoted from the Stemberger blog) that would be called a flub with the complaint that it should have been Stemberger, since PF tends to focus on the “web” and this was a book.

Is it PolitiFact’s call to make rulings on obscure religious books or just evaluate the person using it as a source in a blog that’s been (recently) making the rounds in Florida, the blog of an organization in opposition to a vice (gambling) used by the government to raise funds in lieu of taxes? (Well, it is sort of a tax when you think about it, but I won't get into that here.)

As far as Bryan’s argument with regard to demographics, and the use of the plural, I would use his own defense of “when Conservatives or Republicans say something which would be interpreted similarly” that it’s perfectly fair and reasonable to assume that “poorest segment” and “poorest segments” were synonymous terms in the context of the sentence. In other words, it should be obvious that Grudem had a “had a poverty-level demographic in mind.” That his claim it was less than a “charitable” interpretation by PolitiFact assumes an amount of detail which Grudem should have clarified. With 34 other sources than Stemberger, it appears they tried to verify it, but what they found contradicted his claims.

In addition, while he stressed the plural of the word segments, he ignored the comparative (as a superlative) of what the segment consisted of, poorest (not poor or poorer). This means those with the least wealth, or the most poor. If Grudem said “poorer segments” Bryan would have had more of a case, for this would assume a larger demographic. But “poorest” was more than adequate for PolitiFact’s focus.

Bryan is like the Newt Gingrich of PolitiFact Detractors. He likes to use elaborate arguments which seem intimidating by their intellectualism, but fall apart under closer scrutiny.