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.

What is an earmark? Palin versus Obama

Ed Morrissey today devotes a Hot Air blog entry to an issue I almost felt driven to address early this morning: the manner in which the mainstream media (including The Wall Street Journal) have failed to make important distinctions between funding requests and the corrupt earmarking system members of Congress use to do each other and key constituents favors.

The level of federal spending requests have dropped under Palin’s administration both years, but quite obviously she still puts in requests for Congressional cash. The question that the WSJ never really answers is how those requests come to Congress. If they come in earmark form, then the McCain campaign has some explaining to do about its rhetoric the past three weeks. If not, then this is a non-story, and in fact shows Palin weaning Alaska off of Washington’s largesse.

Earmarks are not equivalent to all federal spending, as McCain himself notes. If these requests did not come in earmark form, then Congress has the opportunity to vote directly on spending the money in Alaska based on the legitimacy of the projects. Earmarks, on the other hand, get slipped into bills without such Congressional scrutiny and are almost impossible to remove regardless of the uselessness of the project.

This distinction helps explain why Robyn Blumner's editorial column from the weekend was such an outrageous lie, and also why PolitiFact' handling of McCain's earmark history was ultimately an example of how not to do fact-checking.

Comparing Obama's earmarks to Palin's without making any distinction between the type of earmark conveys a very misleading impression. Obama spent his first two years in the Senate wallowing in the existing trough of secret earmarks. That is why Obama's earmarks were discovered through his own admission rather than via media exposure as in the case of Alaska's requests for federal funding.

GOP beats Dems on earmarks

Looks like the Republicans in Congress really did something right this time.

I haven't posted about it, but I've seethed over the Pelosi/Obey plan to accomplish earmark reform by incorporating slush funds within a given bill so that earmarks could be anonymously added after the bill had been debated.

That plan was an insult to representative goverment, removing the actions of representatives even further from the scrutiny of the people they represent. The Dems ought to pay a price for the move when elections come due--but I guess they can hope the mainstream media spin machine will make them appear purty, dry and clean as a whistle.

House Democrats have agreed to abandon their own sneaky plan in favor of the earmark reform plan suggested by Republicans last year. And that is a huge improvement.

Hat tip to Captain's Quarters; go there for more of the nuts and bolts.