Lil White Lies: Double Bain Dead

A post at Sublime Bloviations says this PolitiFact fact-check is ”a joke” and not relevant, and its "inflammatory" partner anti-factchecker blog counterirritant chimes along, adding Limbaugh “didn’t try to make [the] argument” to support PolitiFact’s ruling of Pants on Fire.

Let’s start by taking a look at what Limbaugh initially said, from the PolitiFact ruling:

"This evil villain in the new Batman movie is named Bane. And there's now a discussion out there as to whether or not this is purposeful and whether or not it will influence voters. It's gonna have a lot of people. This movie, the audience is gonna be huge. A lot of people are gonna see the movie, and it's a lot of brain-dead people, entertainment, the pop culture crowd, and they're gonna hear Bane in the movie and they're gonna associate Bain. The thought is that when they start paying attention to the campaign later in the year, and Obama and the Democrats keep talking about Bain, Romney and Bain, that these people will think back to the Batman movie, ‘Oh, yeah, I know who that is.’ There are some people who think it'll work. Others think you're really underestimating the American people to think that will work."

He wrapped up:

"You may think it's ridiculous, I'm just telling you this is the kind of stuff the Obama team is lining up. The kind of people who would draw this comparison are the kind of people that they are campaigning to. These are the kind of people that they are attempting to appeal to."

But wait, there’s more! The implication from Sublime Bloviations' Bryan White was that since Limbaugh could not be taken seriously, it was not worth fact-checking (even though even PolitiFact admitted it was a  “pop culture diversion" ). But it gets seriously expanded the following day, as scripted at the Rush Limbaugh website, and serves to further contradict counterirritant’s claims:

So I'm in the library last night, and I'm doing what I always do. I'm doing show prep. And I get a text message from Kathryn who's in with the dogs in the kitchen. She says, "Are you in this Batman movie and you didn't tell me? Is this Batman movie about you?" I said, "What now?" She says, "I can't go anywhere without reading about you and this Batman movie." And I finally, in that moment, folks, I finally figured out what's going on. I outed them. Forget the creator. I don't care that the creator created the character Bane in the Batman movie back in the '90s. It doesn't matter. The Democrats clearly were going to try to link this villain to Mitt Romney. And I outed 'em. They've even got a couple Democrats admitting they were gonna, Chris Leheinous and Jon Stewart. And they're still trying to do it.

You know, independently of the producers and the actors and all the people associated with the movie, they saw it, they were gonna try to make the linkage, and now I'm out there basically accusing them of that, so they've got their backs up. They're acting like I'm some sort of conspiracy creep. But I outed 'em. I have shined the light of truth, as it were.

Counterirritant says Limbaugh never advanced the idea “ that the villain Bane was named in reference to Bain Capital.” Yes he did—he advanced it by being the first one to say “there was a discussion out there whether or not this was purposeful” and associating Bane to Bain and the Democrats in the next few sentences. In other words, if he didn’t advance the idea, what was it then that Limbaugh was “outing” the Democrats for? What precisely was that “light of truth”? Counterirritant debates like White, in that he tries to ignore the obvious.

So, the next issue becomes whether PolitiFact should rightfully consider Limbaugh's claims "a joke."  In 2008, Limbaugh was thought to have “caused mischief” in the Democratic primaries. According to one article, the Indiana primary “may be the first vote in which his influence [was] measured in qualitative terms.” He called it “Operation Chaos.” And more recently, his calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” was taken so seriously, many of his sponsors dropped him.

In 2010, just before the Republican mid-term election rout, he outlined his “plans” with the Daily Beast:

In a recent e-mail exchange, Limbaugh laid out his to-do list, which includes repeal of the health-care law and the financial-regulatory-reform bill; ending the ban on offshore drilling; the reprivatization of General Motors, Chrysler, and the student-loan program; a spike in the heart of cap-and-trade legislation (he regards global warming as a hoax); the elimination of the capital-gains tax; a reduction of the corporate tax rate to 20 percent; and replacement of the progressive income-tax code with a flat or “fair” tax.

Isn't Photo Shop wonderful?

So, does this “to do list” sound like a joke? (Well, maybe John Boehner laughed about it at the time.) The fact is there were two very simplistic “explanations” presented by these two Limbaugh apologists: (1) by White, that it didn’t matter when the character Bane was created, and PolitiFact should have fact-checked it “by looking at those who decided to make Bane the villain in this movie and when that decision was made, for starters.” Obviously, Bane had been “cast” as a villain since 1993, so this seems to be one of those nit-picky “asking the same question over and over” ploys of White. Along with his repeated implication that it’s a joke, which by virtue of Limbaugh’s follow up (“I finally figured out what’s going on, I outed them”) doesn’t seem to be the case….and (2) by counterirritant’s just plain not reading everything, because he obviously didn’t know what Limbaugh said the following day, which negates his claim that “Limbaugh never takes a side in the discussion of purposefulness.” When Limbaugh said he “outed” the Democrats, he had certainly taken a side, and let his “purposefulness” be known.

So the fact-check was by no means “completely illogical.” White did not put this one through his Grading PolitiFact exercise, instead calling it a "politi-flub," but it is just another unfounded criticism of a PolitiFact ruling that deserves a spot on my Lil White Lies list….along with that of counterirritant.