Why Intellectual Dishonesty Is Never A Good Idea

Now that we're in the home stretch of this campaign season (56 days and counting), you are undoubtedly being inundated by e-mails, as have I, tearing down one candidate or the other. In my experience, the majority of these mass e-mails are dubiously sourced, at best, or, at worst, a compendium of outright lies designed to smear the candidate and scare voters off from supporting him. The recipients of these e-mails would do well to find out the facts on their own and debunk these false missives wherever possible. It is one thing to forward them to friends and family; it is quite another to post them to one's blog as if they were the author's work, without attribution or explanation.

Such was the case with a recent post on Automatic Rebalancing. You all will remember AR from this charming post in April of this year, which depicted a group of black people running away from Obama after he pledged "to make sure everyone who can work will have a job." How witty...if you're at the local Christian Identity meeting.

Such was the case on Monday when AR posted a lengthy comparison of the tax policies of Obama and McCain. The purpose of the exercise, given the partisan slant of the blog, was to highlight how disastrous Obama's policies would be for the average taxpayer and how beneficent McCain's policies would be. The author introduced this post by stating his bonafides as a "professional in the financial services industry" and claiming that the "following information has been researched and verified..." Seems legit, no? The post goes on to list comparisons in different tax categories (capital gains, dividends, income tax, etc) with comments by the author supporting the "facts" as presented.

Well, I smelled a rat. So, off to teh Yahoo intertubes search engine I ran and, lo and behold, found that most of the content of the post came directly from a rancid piece of anti-Obama astroturf making its way through e-mail inboxes across the land. Both of the popular online urban legend debunking sites, Snopes.com and FactCheck.org, called the information contained in this sleaze false and definitely misleading.

Knowing that AR has the cowardly policy of reviewing comments for moderation (or editing) before they're posted, I sent the following comment:

You're such an "expert" that you cut and pasted a false spam e-mail that's already been debunked by snopes.com? (http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/taxes.asp)

Just of kicks, let's take the income tax claim of this nonsense...as snopes noted, Obama does not favor extending the tax cuts for households with incomes of $250,000 or more per year. None of the brackets you listed apply to that level, so their inclusion is not only irrelevant, it's a flat out lie about Obama's tax policy. In fact, the taxpayers in the brackets you listed would see a greater reduction under Obama's plan than they would under McCain's "let's make the Bush tax cuts for the rich permanent"plan.

So much for the information having been "researched and verified". It's full of shit!

I would hope that you don't reproduce this same shoddy, lazy effort for your clients.

P.S. You can either publish this comment as is or it's going up verbatim on my blog

Well, I didn't have to worry about making good on my threat, as AR published a fierce rebuttal to my comment yesterday. Under the heading "Ah, self-righteous indignation...Wonderfully droll, isn't it?"

Well, I do tend to get self-righteous when I'm actually right.

In his defense, AR claims that he omitted the claims he thought were "absurd" and kept the ones he thought were "worthy of query". Well, thank goodness for that. Instead of cut-and-pasting all of the bullshit, AR just gave us a little taste.

The main problem with AR's original post is that it doesn't provide any links to any of Obama's actual proposals, nor does it cite any sources for the claims it makes (and AR expounds upon). AR claims he used other sources (a neo-conservative rag out of NYC and Dick Morris, for Christ's sake), but strangely does not cite them directly.

The post is predicated on a bushel of wild, exaggerated assumptions on Obama's policies...it invents whole claims out of thin air when they are not supported by the facts in evidence (i.e. Obama's own website). Any blather following cannot be taken seriously because the original assertion is either misleading or blatantly false.

Notwithstanding AR's mention of conservative nutjob media to support his case, he states the Tax Policy Center (a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute) "didn't have all the hard facts of either plan and had to make assumptions on key elements"....well, no shit, numbnuts. The difference is that the Tax Policy Center discloses this right up front and doesn't pass off wild speculation as fact, as you did.

AR is correct in one area....I am certainly no expert in economic issues. I didn't get my MBA by dazzling professors with my views on relevant economic theory or my vast knowledge of our current tax codes. I can use a fucking search engine, though, and when I spot bullshit, I call it bullshit.

FactCheck.org does a much better job than I possibly could in debunking this nonsense...here's the link again if you want to go through the gory details. I doubt one could call FactCheck.org an illegitmate source, being that it's funded by the Annenberg Foundation, which was founded by the noted leftist commie pinko Walter Annenberg.

Pay special attention to the last line of FactCheck's expose:

The short answer to our reader’s question is, no, this message isn’t real. It’s a pack of lies.