Sidebar: PolitiFact Gets Out the Cookie Cutter

Back in the 1980’s, General Motors made a critical mistake with its cars as a means of cost saving. The most expensive part of the car when there’s a design change is the metal fabrication: the outer skin of the car. The cost of metal fab tool and die changes is unbelievably huge. This is the only part of the car GM “owns” and does not outsource because it is actually more expensive to do so. To save (a lot of) money, Roger Smith (a.k.a. the Roger of Michael Moore’s documentary “Roger and Me”) decided that the cars at each platform (small, mid-size, luxury, etc.) would have the same “skin” while only making  changes to the “badging” and other options that were unique to the brand. The term for it was “commonization”—by having as many parts of the car the same between the brands, GM would save money in terms of purchase (volume discount) as well as manufacture. The result was GM getting labeled by critics for having cookie cutter cars—panned in competitors TV commercials of parking valets who couldn’t find the drivers’ GM car because they all looked so much alike, as well as such memorable vehicles like the Cadillac Cimarron. With that and GM’s persistent lack of quality, the sales downfall began until they slowly eroded into bankruptcy.

The same ruling but with different names.

With that in mind, these six rulings from the end of August/early September, found when I was compiling the latest PolitiFact (PF) Truth Index statistics, were a bit troubling in the same sort of cookie cutter way. While there was some variation in the writing, “commonizations” could be found throughout the rulings. While re-checked rulings often exhibit these characteristics, this one was not a re-check but a six-in-one, one-time collective effort.

According to certain conservative websites and blogs, there are 70 “card-carrying socialists” in the U.S. House of Representatives, specifically, the 111th Congress. From there, PolitiFacts Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon and Texas merely had to fill in the blanks as to the Democrats being accused of this in their respective states, and those were the statement(s) for fact-checking.  Then it was noted that the 111th Congress is not the current congress but the previous. So that left a few people voted out in the 2010 Republican rout who may have been counted in the total “70” number. Then there’s naming the name of the “culprit” who was spreading this: a blogger named Dan Cofall on a website called Sovereign Citizens United, who of course did not respond when asked by PF for any comments.

Next PF went to the socialist group itself—the DSA, Democratic Socialists of America—to confirm if those Democrats named were indeed listed as card-carrying members, to which its  national director Frank Llewellyn responded that any such list was “completely fraudulent.” As repeated verbatim in most of the rulings:

The list that Cofall and dozens more rely upon "is completely fraudulent," said Frank Llewellyn, who served as national director of the Democratic Socialists of America for 10 years until stepping down July 5.

There is not one member of Congress who is a formal member of the DSA, Llewellyn said. In order to join, a person must fill out a form and pay dues. Even Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, is not a formal member of the DSA, Llewellyn said.

The last member of Congress who was an actual card-carrying member, he said, was California Democratic Rep. Ron Dellums, who served 28 years in the House until leaving in 1998.

Llewellyn and DSA’s new national director, Maria Svart are chagrined for two reasons. First, they have to spend time knocking down reports that never seem to go away.

What usually follows is filling in the blanks with the emphatic denials of the subject Democrats being targeted, and some of the PF writers’ contact with the Sovereign Citizens United website (other than Cofall), which (of course!) claim an all-or-nothing equivalency between the Democratic Socialists of America and the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Three of the reviews featured this concluding paragraph rendering the Pants on Fire judgment:

Misinformation and smear campaigns also are part of political life. But these persistent claims about socialists are riddled with errors and outright lies. Any one of the problems would be sufficient to discredit the report, but taken together, the effort is flagrantly false.

Writer Charles Pope wrote or assisted in four of the PF pieces; the only writer to break away from the pack and not copy anything word for word was Eric Stirgus of PF Georgia. Stirgus, however, frequently referred to the findings of PF Oregon. He also chose to set the pants on fire of Sovereign Citizens United instead of “Bloggers” as the other five did. He also throws in an interesting tidbit from the DSA:

Llewellyn [DSA director] said there are no members of Congress who are members of the DSA and he rolls his eyes at claims that President Barack Obama is a socialist.

"We have a banner that says ‘Obama is not a socialist, but we are,’ " Llewellyn said.

Not that I think the Sovereign Citizens United website would believe that Obama was not a socialist, either. But that would be one ruling by PF National, not six rulings on the identical topic for whichever PF state covers those politician(s). In addition, like the light bulb rulings covered a few months ago, PF does not list any affiliation for either the bloggers or Sovereign Citizens United. In a way, if Sovereign Citizens United were listed as a conservative website (which it most likely is), this ruling would have appropriately been counted only once against the Republicans. Instead, it was counted six times Pants on Fire against no one, and against the Republicans six times in my Truth Index calculations, in the same way as the earlier light bulb rulings. While I can understand that some topics are occasionally repeated and re-visited, this was one en masse Pants on Fire too close for comfort. PF needs to end production on the Cadillac Cimarron before its readers catch on.