Grading PolitiFact: If you're fine with equivocation then McCain requested earmarks

Apparently there are some stubborn folks over at PolitiFact.

PolitiFact recently floated again the suggestion that McCain has requested earmark spending, contrary to McCain's claims on the campaign trail. But there are different types of "earmark" spending, and one class in particular that represents an ethical problem in Washington.

I wrote about that distinction here, and PolitiFact/CQ notes and dismisses the objection.

McCain, meanwhile, has mostly eschewed earmarks, even if the Arizona senator should learn to never say “never” as he has claimed, erroneously, many times throughout the campaign.

As Politifact writer John Frank pointed out earlier this year, McCain has rarely sought pork but he has on a few occasions, such as his 2006 legislation that asked for $10 million for an academic center at the University of Arizona to honor the late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Or McCain’s 2003 effort to use federal funds to buy property to create a buffer zone around Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, or his 1992 request that the Environmental Protection Agency provide $5 million toward a wastewater project in Nogales, Ariz.

While McCain advocates have argued in the past that these projects don’t meet the definition of pork barrel spending, pork critics disagree. “If it doesn’t meet the technical term of earmark, it would probably meet the public idea of one,” Pete Sepp, a vice president at the conservative, anti-pork National Taxpayers Union, told the New York Times in reference to the Rehnquist center request.

(Congressional Quarterly, via PolitiFact; bold emphasis added)

The PolitiFact analysis, as I pointed out before, represents a fallacy of equivocation. PolitiFact, in effect, is quote-mining Pete Sepp in order to attack McCain. And the technique is obvious given a close look at the final paragraph.

Sepp admits the existence of a technical meaning for "earmark" as well as a "public idea of one." And by implication they aren't the same thing, even as presented by PolitiFact. And given PolitiFact's association with Congressional Quarterly, the distinction cannot be wholly unknown to their writers and editors, either.

Here's what Pete Sepp would say if given enough space:

I do wish there were more room for appreciating the complexities of earmarking in the fact check piece. My point is that the average voter may or may not agree with Senator McCain's assertions on earmarking, depending upon what bothers that voter the most about the issue. If the voter's primary objection to this process is that lawmakers introduce too many spending bills that benefit only narrow local interests, then that voter may not be all that impressed with McCain's stance (even though there are many more prolific practitioners of this art in the Senate than McCain). If, on the other hand, the voter's primary objection is that earmarking circumvents public debate and other budget processes, then they would likely be quite satisfied with Senator McCain's philosophy.
(Pete Sepp e-mail, first published here)

Nobody should be satisfied with a fact-checking outfit that engages in the fallacy of equivocation, however.