Lil White Lies Extra: Hopelessly De-Voted

Early in June, as I was about to take an intermission from my blog, I received some commentary from my conservative counterpart, lambasting a recent Lil White Lies post on his criticism of a PolitiFact ruling concerning shark attacks and voting fraud in Florida.

I decided not to waste my time with him and deleted his comment; I also felt it was a bit of a threat—basically the sort of argument by intimidation he commonly uses.

Customized for Lil White Lies

He intimated that I had better recant and delete the post called “Jumping the Shark” because it contained such grievous errors...about which, of course, he would elaborate no further. I refused to take the bait….well, until now—and no, I didn’t withdraw the post: it remains intact and unedited. At the time, however, I couldn’t waste time with his never-ending Gish Gallup (thank you, Eric Levine) of why he is the conservative cartel of truth and why anything a liberal says (or I should say, anyone who disagrees with him) doesn’t know what they’re talking about and must be condescended. And if you won’t buy into his bogus quality, he’s then going to resort to quantity. Until he wears you out.

After the threat of whatever error I made ruining my blogging career, he then followed with how "all you liberals have to censor my comments”….an accusation of cowardice (more argument by intimidation), basically. Well, yea, this is my blog and I’m not obligated to publish everyone’s comments….some blogs don’t allow any comments. I didn’t feel like publishing his. He can call me whatever, if I don’t want to publish them, I don’t have to.  Conservatives like to go on and on about freedom, but somehow I don't have the freedom to delete a comment.

So he then posted something to replace those comments at his “Bad Blogs Blood” blog, which I’ve previously described as a poorly formatted, sporadically posted, minutely viewed blog used to supplement his “master blog” for criticism where he wants to give his victim the least web “airtime” possible, to create a class below Slimey Bloviations for blogs that he doesn’t agree with.

But let’s get to the gist of his criticism:

In my original post I pointed to evidence from the Miami Herald that thousands of felons may have voted in the 2000 election. That's the Bush/Gore election. It was illegal at that time for felons to vote in Florida. No question about it. As for my follow up post about the television news story, that wasn't about felons at all. It was about non-citizens voting. Non-citizens aren't allowed to vote whether felons or not.

The way in which I do Lil White Lie posts needs to be explained first. I copy/paste the Grading PolitiFact piece to a Word document, along with the link. That way I only have to go to the Slimey Bloviations blogsite one time. That way I can refer to it as much as I want on one page, and can directly, easily copy whatever White has written if a quotation is needed.

So, since White is complaining that his post was not about felons but about non-citizens, I searched the post first for the word felons…it appears six times, here’s where it appears four times, and you can tell this is what the post was about: (italics added)

The fallacy in PolitiFact's reasoning comes easily to light.

For most of Florida's history as part of the United States it has prohibited voting by felons. Every time a felon votes illegally, it constitutes a case of voter fraud--albeit not the phony representation of "case" settled on by the fact checkers.

Most often nothing can be done to prosecute a case of voter fraud against a felon who votes illegally even though it happens with some regularity. The Miami Herald, for example, reported the following in the wake of its investigations of the 2000 presidential election:

At least 445 Florida felons voted illegally on Nov. 7, casting another cloud over a disputed presidential election already mired in legal challenges, a Herald investigation has found.

So how about “illegal immigrants” or “non-citizens”? The word immigrant could not be found. The word “non-citizen”—the word which White says this post was premised on and that through “fallacious impetus” I missed it, only appeared in a very brief addendum as an update to his “concrete examples” listing the types of voter fraud: “A Florida television station airs a story documenting approximately 100 non-citizens registered to vote in Florida, at least some of whom voted in past elections.”

That was it. I never read whatever follow up story he had after this Grading PolitiFact review. Although he may later have added a link, my copy/paste would have brought it over to my Word document, but it didn’t. My review was based on his original review, as well it should have been, not what he decided to add later about non-citizens.

In a recent post, I spoke of the Christmas Tree/ornament analogy, and this applies here. The Christmas Tree is that it’s not about the fraud—it’s about those who can legitimately vote being unable to do so, and by virtue of how the voter ID and voter scrubbing operate, it would predominately be those who vote Democrat. Around the tree are White’s ornaments about all the possible types of voter fraud that could occur as a frightening possibility.   Whether it's non-citizens, felons, or registration, the Republican end tactic for them is preventing legitimate voters from voting.

Pennsylvania Republican House Leader Mike Turzai (R-PA) came out and admitted the Christmas Tree was there, unlike White: 

For this he says that I have “earned a spot on the BBBBBBB” a mythical symbol of my being a terrible, stupid, evil liberal blogger. It’s just another argument from authority, the presupposed, ersatz license of awarding a “spot on a list.” Well even porn movies have their version of the Academy Award, I guess this is something like that. Slimey Bloviations sort of sounds like porn, too.

But….two can play this game. Besides a customized ornament award for missing the Christmas Tree again, White gets my golden Biggest bullsh*tter award. Because, just as I suspected, his whole argument was just that.