Liberal Dem Mark Strama tries to sound fiscally responsible, Politifact has his back

Let me just say at the outset that this post may get off in the weeds a little bit.  But it’s important for a couple of reasons.  One, it’s a demonstration of how very liberal Democrats try to tack towards fiscal restraint during election season (while acting as doctrinaire liberals when actual bills are on the line).  And two, it shows how Politifact Texas, which is supposed to be a non-partisan fact-checker, really fails to do proper research, and to some extent that that’s intentional.  I’ve been watching that outfit just about since its inception here, and there’s been consistency to their “fact checks,” in that they let a lot of the actual facts go unchecked.

The case in point here concerns Texas state Rep. Mark Strama.  He’s an Obama-style liberal, runs in the 50th District which is in Travis County.  That would be Austin, of hippie “Keep Austin Weird” fame.  It’s a liberal place.  But even in such a place, Strama has come out with a mailer touting the support of a Republican, and over the notion that Strama has helped said Republican “cut property taxes and keep our public schools open.”  Well, Politifact looked into it and designed their fact-check to be sufficiently narrow that they didn’t actually have to fact-check Strama’s claim.  They just had to fact-check whether he sent the mailer out or not, and having verified that, they’re off to hack-check something else.

But that’s not the end of the story.  Blue Dot Blues did the legwork that Politifact failed to do, and found Strama’s actual claims, the ones at the heart of his mailer designed to make him look less moonbatty liberal than he really is, to be empty.   He’s taking credit for being hawkish on taxes and cool on the schools, but he’s had no demonstrable role in either issue since he has been in the legislature.  He’s voted with the Democrats, lock step, or done nothing visible at all.  And Politifact’s narrowly designed fact-check just side-stepped that whole issue, even though it’s the very core of story.

This is how liberal Democrats in Texas tend to roll, and it’s also how Politifact tends to roll.  The libDems claim hawkishness, and Politifact misses the giant facts at the ends of their noses while wandering off into the weeds on minutiae that’s often tangential or even beside the point. 

A case in point, several months back the Texas Republicans jumped all over Dem gov nominee Bill White for presiding over the construction of one of the largest abortion mills in the entire world.  The GOP connected White to the Planned Parenthood monstrosity because he was mayor of Houston at the time, and had hired a Planned Parenthood bigwig to a very powerful post in his mayoral administration.  Her name is Elena Marks.  To most reasonable minds, the connection here is hard to miss: Mayor empowers major Planned Parenthood figure high in his administration, Planned Parenthood builds monstrous six-story abortion mill in that city, the mayor did nothing to stop it, so he’s given at least tacit if not overt support to the project.  I mean, at a minimum, if Bill White didn’t like the abortion mill’s looming shadow stretching across his fair city, he could have fired Marks to show his disapproval.  But he did no such thing.  How did Politifact treat the Republicans’ claims?  Well, without refuting a single fact in the Republicans’ story, they called them “Pants on Fire.”  That’s just how they roll.