My conservative counterpart had not published anything nor had been commenting on Facebook since the beginning of this year, and I was enjoying the quiet time. I know he has been working on a “special PolitiFact project” which was supposedly the be-all and end-all of proving PolitiFact’s liberal bias, but he had said he was working on something last year about this time, so I didn’t think too much of it (maybe it was his joint effort initiating the PolitiFact Bias blog with Jeff Dyberg). When I first saw some comments by him leading to this Lil White Lies post, I had added a comment of “Hey LOOK who’s crawled out from under his rock.” But on second thought I retracted it, and just “liked” some comments in response to his, whereby he added “Discounting KS's pablum before she even starts, there's no way to reconcile these two rulings without employing a fallacy of equivocation.” So, that “KS” is probably me, but I have to say: why even predict it if you think it’s pablum? Maybe I should have left the “under the rock” comment in.
So....I’ll begin this post mimicking how Bryan started his:
Yes.
This.
IS.
Easy.
To.
Reconcile.
Unless.
You’re.
Just a.
Bitter.
Conservative.
Let me translate/simplify:
Morgan Griffith says: There’s a NEW rule (read: more job-killing regulation!) that milk spills will be treated like oil spills!
 |
| Griffith misinterpreted and misled by stating this was a "new" ruling, as well as the fact it was up for elimination. |
PolitiFact (PF) says: No it’s not new, it’s been around 38 years, and there’s a proposal to eliminate it, so it’s just the opposite of what Griffith says.
Obama says in his SOTU: I removed this rule.
PF says: Yes, he removed this rule.
So, why is Bryan White having a cow?
Try it this way:
Morgan Griffith says: There’s a NEW rule (read: job-killing regulations!) that milk spills will be treated like oil spills!
PF says: No it’s not new, it’s been around 38 years, and it’s under study for being removed, so it’s just the opposite of what Griffith says.
Bryan White says: Yes it’s been around 38 years, if it was there when Griffith said it was a new rule (even though he called it “new” and it wasn’t) then what he said is at least Half True. “But the exemption would not have covered raw milk, which should have left Griffith's claim at least partly true. And if raw milk received no exemption from the EPA then Obama's claim is approximately half true as well.” ( I'm crossing this out ironically since Bryan goes on to correct his original “this sound like a good excuse” post—this just points up how he was looking for something to fit his argument.)
PF says: Yes, he removed this rule.
Bryan White says: It was originally proposed for removal under the Bush Administration, but Obama recalled it for further study, so it can’t be (all) true because it wasn’t Obama’s idea.
Welcome to the world of Bryan White checking the fact-checkers. Or, Bryan White trying to find a way to steal back the milk that Obama said he cleaned up. Or Bryan White finagling around trying to disguise his own bias and find a way to get the credit back for de-regulating under the GOP column. Oh, there’s something in the way he moos.
The best explanation for his defense, however, comes from a New York Times article early in 2011 which shows what really led Morgan Griffith to say what he did:
To Republicans, it sounds like the perfect symbol of a regulatory agency run amok: U.S. EPA treating spilled milk the same way that it does spilled oil….
How that effort began to snowball into the milk rule's use as an effective talking point is difficult to determine.
"Having milk regulated the same as oil -- that's so ridiculous, it could be a skit on Jon Stewart," Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said in a brief interview this week after leaving a Republican conference luncheon where, he added, EPA's dairy-spill rule was cited as an example of a runaway federal bureaucracy.
House Republican critics of the agency were citing the spill regulation and proposing bills to force EPA's hand on an exclusion as far back as mid-2010 (E and E Daily, May 28, 2010).
But President Obama's recent drive to eliminate unnecessary or overlapping federal regulations, punctuated by a State of the Union quip about salmon, appears to have driven the milk-spill exclusion into the mainstream.
A Wall Street Journal editorial two days later fanned the flames with what Detlefsen described as "some inaccuracies," including a contention that EPA was planning to apply SPCC rules to dairies, rather than grant an exemption.
The “inaccuracies” along with Griffith’s and the rest of the Republican parties anti-regulatory penchant (where just the opposite was happening) added to the justification for making Griffith’s oil-milk spill claim a False one. Nevertheless, along with his blog post, Bryan devoted six comments on PF’s Facebook page attacking how it approached the fact-check of Obama while comparing it to a previous fact-check of Griffith.
He first says that “PF said” the rule never existed. But PolitiFact made it clear in the Griffith ruling, which the Obama ruling references as a source (which further clouds Bryan’s assertion that they may be in conflict):
Griffith claimed a "new ruling by the EPA would force dairy farmers to comply" with strict regulations for spills and leaks. He said the rules were the same as those enforced on oil and natural gas companies.
In fact, these regulations have been in place for 38 years and are not new at all. The "new ruling" from the EPA, announced in 2009 and taking effect in a few weeks, actually excludes milk from the spill standards, giving dairy farmers fewer regulations to meet. That’s the exact opposite of what Griffith claims.
Then following an incoherent, convoluted explanation of an EPA Q&A, Bryan complains that this was started under Bush and that “the only reason he [Obama] had the chance to save us from the EPA's application of oil spill rules to milk was by preventing Bush from fixing it first.” According to the New York Times, however, “the proposed rule was issued the week before Bush left office and became part of a broader freeze of pending regulations that typically occurs when a new administration takes over.” Bush had the chance to fix it but waited too long.
In other words, Obama co-opted the Republicans’ anti-regulatory thunder by saying “we got rid of one rule from 40 years ago that could have forced some dairy farmers to spend $10,000 a year proving that they could contain a spill – because milk was somehow classified as an oil.”
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