Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [39]
“Hey, I didn’t get to be the head of the world’s largest energy trading company just by being a crook.”
“So, wait. He’s taking phony numbers, using them in a phony way, to make a phony point?”
“Yeah. You got this guy’s number? I got a little start-up company cooking here, and I need a CFO who’s willing to, you know, push the envelope.”
“Gee, I don’t have the number on me.”
“Well, when you find it, give me a call on the Lear. Margie and I are flying to Aspen for the week. Gotta go.”
You know, Ken Lay might have taken a real beating in the press, but if you need someone in a pinch to look at some shady number-crunching, he’s a pal.
No sooner had I hung up with Ken, then I got a call from Thomas Mann at the Brookings Institution which (as you may remember) bills itself as an “independent, nonpartisan organization.” Mann confirmed everything Lay had told me, but in a more boring, think tank-y way. He explained that Kottman had compared apples to oranges, or more precisely, apple lies to orange lies. An honest chart would compare Reagan’s budget proposal to the budgets Congress actually passed. The Hannity/Kottman chart, by contrast, compares Reagan’s budget to total spending. Here’s the trouble: Once Congress passes a budget, what is actually spent can vary depending on economic conditions, non-budgetary policy changes, and estimation errors. This variance in spending cannot be entirely blamed on either Congress or the White House.
Thanks for the fucking civics lesson, Tom.
Okay, let’s rewind. Remember how Hannity described his table? He said it proved that “had all of Reagan’s budgets been adopted, federal spending would have been 25 percent less on a cumulative basis.” Even if we ignore all the table’s faults, this is still a whopper.
If you accept the bizarro cumulative percent differences, you can argue that eight years of Congressional budget increases would have yielded a 24.5 percent increase over the last year of Reagan’s budget (1989). But Hannity, lyingly, makes the claim that it would have been 25 percent lower over the entire period. This is where Hannity left out one of Kottman’s numbers. On Kottman’s original table, he included an “average cumulative percentage difference” number, 3.1 percent. The fact that Hannity chose to omit this one specific number shows that, yet again, he knew he was lying.
Remember our first meeting, Sean? Remember, we discussed intellectual dishonesty?
Even if Kottman’s numbers weren’t phony, and even if Hannity were correctly interpreting the table, and even if the “cumulative” technique were something other than a laughable charade, then still, even then, Congress would have only passed $274 billion in extra spending in a period when the debt shot up $1,402 billion. So even in this loony right-wing fantasyland of a budget scenario, the deficits still weren’t caused by Democratic congressional spending.
Still, I was curious. What really happened in the so-called “eighties”? So, at the risk of being bored, I called back Tom Mann, who put together an accurate table. Unlike the Hannity/Kottman table, which is the work of a hack, this table is the work of a scholar, which comes from the Latin scholarum, meaning “one who uses facts instead of lies.” (Italics mine.)
Actual Real Facts Table
Source: Budget of the United States, Fiscal Years 1982–1989; Congressional Almanac 1982–1989
Kudos to Tom for his excellent work on this one, especially the clearer right-hand column. Kottman, if you remember, styles himself “The Reality Hammer.” Well, we Democrats have a few tools in our figurative toolbox as well. So let’s apply our “Lie Detecting Plunger” to the lie-clogged toilet of Hannity’s budget analysis.
Lie #3: The numbers on the chart are phony.
Lie #4: The “cumulative percentage difference” is presented as if it means something.
Lie #5: Hannity takes the cumulative percentage difference and, confident in his readers’ inability to interpret or think, intentionally mischaracterizes its already bogus conclusions. In for a penny, in for a pound!
Lie #6: The