Democracy Has Prevailed.

February 6, 2015

Un-frickin-believable - Even For The Tribune-Review! How Many Mistakes DOES Katie Pavlich Make?

I guess we can't expect even the slightest fidelity to things stubborn things called "facts" over there at the Tribune-Review.

Take a look at this column from Townhall editor Katie Pavlich.  From the first paragraph we can see the whirling flurry of her conservative spin:
As if saddling America's largest generation with trillions in crushing debt wasn't enough, President Obama's latest insult to millennials is just another reason they should regret voting for him.
Interesting to note here that Politifact checked out this statement from President Obama:
We cut our deficits by more than half.
And found it to be true.

As a percentage of GDP:


And in 2009 Dollars:


Funny how a conservative writer writing for a conservative paper never ever got around to mentioning this little fact.

It's understandable, of course, why such facts would be absent but let's delve further into Pavlich's whirl.  Look here:
YouTube star GloZell Green was recently handpicked to interview President Obama at the White House following his State of the Union address. On the front end, I will give Green credit for asking tougher questions than many in the White House press corps have for years. One of the goals of this choice was to “reach out” to millennials, America's largest generation.
The interesting thing here is that if you were to actually do the work and read the transcript of these youtube interviews, you'll see that no where is the word "millennial" ever used.  And then there's this criticism of Ms Green:
The problem? Although Green uses new forms of media to reach younger audiences, she isn't a millennial at all. She's a 52-year-old woman who seemingly never grew past the maturity level of 13. In fact, she could be considered a baby boomer, the generation often criticized for robbing millennials of their wealth and future.
Does Ms Green ever claim to be a millennial?  Well if you were to do the work and check her bio at her web page, the answer would be a firm no.

Does The White House ever claim that Glozell Green is a millennial?  Well if you were to do the work and check out the White House announcement about these interviews, the answer would still be a firm no.

So when Pavlich writes:
Choosing people outside the announced targeted demographic and then falsely parading them as fitting the qualification is typical for the White House.
She's all sorts of wrong, isn't she?  No one presented the youtube interviews as "reaching out to millennials" and no one presented Glozell Green as a millennial, either.  Exactly how much of a projection is this?  How far from reality have we gone?

Her next sentence says it all:
Remember “23-year-old” law student Sandra Fluke? She was 30 when she asked taxpayers to foot the bill for birth control.
Did Sandra Fluke ever claim to be 23? If you were to do the work and look at her testimony before Congress, you'd see how Fluke describes herself - part of it actually matches what Pavlich wrote:
My name is Sandra Fluke, and I'm a third year student at Georgetown Law, a Jesuit school.
So the "law student" part's actually right.  How about the "23-year old" part?

Nope - she never presented herself as 23.  That seems to be a mistake made on NBC on May 1, 2012  But on March 3, 2013 (2 days later) the Washington Post published this:
“I understood that I’m stepping into the public eye,” said Fluke, 30, a third-year student studying public interest law. “But this reaction is so out of the bounds of acceptable discourse . . . These types of words shouldn’t be applied to anyone.” [Emphasis added.]
Funny how THAT didn't make it into Pavlich's column, either.

With all these simply checked (if one were to actually do the work) facts misrepresented in one column can we trust anything else Katie Pavlich wrote in it?

I don't think we can.

But then again it IS from the Op-Ed pages of the Tribune-Review so we simply can't expect any fidelity to the facts.

2 comments:

Social Justice NPC Anti-Paladin™ said...

Of course, Dayvoe leaves out the "facts" that the Democrats controlled Congress during the budgets that Obama uses for a baseline in the "cut our deficits by more than half."claim.

And that the "supposed one time spending)of TARP and the Obama stimulus are included in the GW Bush's last budget that progressives use to inflate the baseline.

Ol' Froth said...

LOOK OVER THERE!!!!!