Coming across a PolitiFact ruling that arguably could be one category higher or lower, particularly those in the center spectrum of rulings, is not a particularly good way to prove PolitiFact is biased, or that a particular rating is incorrect. Even my series Grading PolitiFact Liberal-Style suffers from that. I'm trying my best to "tell 'em like I see 'em."
One method my conservative counterpart and his partner in crime try to prove a PolitiFact (PF) rating deserves more than just one move or two is what I would call “dramatic writing.” The words you use, the tone of your writing, can make things look much worse than they are. Those of us who “journalize”—particularly when we have a political axe to grind—can make it look like suspicious connections or behavior, even when they can be shown to be historically common and/or not unusual, are hugely criminal. In other words, there’s not just smoke, there’s a gigantic fire burning down the city, and everyone is just not as smart as Deff Jeff to see it.
Another review by Deff Jeff Dyberg called “Sorting out Solyndra” does just that. He calls it a “clusterfact”—borrowing from “cluster” as a group with the four-letter “F” word replaced with “fact”, which means “a chaotic mess with multiple problems.” You kind of wonder why he even goes to such lengths in writing such a “magnum opus” (3,600+ word count) if that’s indeed what it is. He appears to have been apprenticed by who else but my conservative counterpart to take the review apart sentence by sentence, with complaints not always justified.
Another opus could be written to show how he jumped the shark and “cluster-facted” himself, but I don’t have all day to comb through everything. So I’ll just make a few points about his most strident “facts” of himself.
Speaking of “Tu Quoque Memes”. A large part of Deff Jeff’s novella centers around the tu quoque complaint: that Obama referred to the Solyndra loan process as having started under President Bush, and the Democrats likewise following suit as defense. But there’s another “tu quoque” that he artfully ignores in keeping with his conclusion that the “Solyndra scandal is a rotting pile of stink in a bucket of corruption.” Because if Solyndra meets his definition of “scandal” there’s more scandals in the stink pile. Remember the Koch Brothers, those big Republican contributors?
Of course, by people like Bryan and Jeff, no correlation or causation there.Koch Supply and Trading, LP, one of the world's largest crude oil trading companies, will become the newest supplier of crude oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) under President Bush's plan, announced last November, to fill the nation's emergency oil stockpile to its full capacity by 2005.
Or how ‘bout our former VP, Dick Cheney and his company Halliburton? No, no causation or correlation there, or even cause for accusations of “scandal” or “corruption”:
Wait, there’s one more! One that comes out and just says it!Bunnatine "Bunny" Greenhouse, the former chief oversight official of contracts at the Army Corps of Engineers, has reached a $970,000 settlement six years after she was demoted for publicly criticizing a multi-billion-dollar, no-bid contract to Halliburton—the company formerly headed by then-Vice President Dick Cheney. Greenhouse had accused the Pentagon of unfairly awarding the contract to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root. Testifying before Congress in June 2005, she called the contract the worst case of government abuse she had ever witnessed in her 20-year career.
An inspector general's report charges that top U.S. housing official Alphonso Jackson urged staff members to favor friends of President Bush when awarding Department of Housing and Urban Development contracts.
Favor friends of President Bush? Nah! No cronyism or scandal there! This was in 2006, at the peak of the housing bubble. I wonder if any friends of President Bush went belly up when the housing market crashed, and how this affected their HUD contracts. But that’s okay by Deff Jeff.
Live on Arrival. Deff Jeff also incorrectly states that the loan to Solyndra was “dead” and “had been rejected by the Bush administration.”
