More reader mail

Here’s one I remember circulating when Congress was made up mainly of Republicans:

Even if you aren’t a sports fan this is very interesting!

36 have been accused of spousal abuse

7 have been arrested for fraud

19 have been accused of writing bad checks

117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses

…

Can

You guess which organization this is?

NBA Or NFL?

Give up yet?

Neither,

it’s the 535 members of the

United States Congress

The same group of Idiots that crank out

Hundreds of new laws each year

Designed to keep the rest of us in line.

Well, it wasn’t true for the Republicans and it’s not true for the Democrats. Factcheck.orgcomes to the rescue:

We judge these statistics to be not credible. They originated nearly a decade ago with a Web site that still refuses to provide any proof or documentation, or even to name those accused. …

The Factcheck article points out that the author is anonymous, gives no sources, no way to check the statistics, and accuses dozens of members of Congress without giving their party affiliations or naming a single one. No dates are given for any of them.

Some of the claims, given a little thought, are wildly implausible. If 84 members of Congress really had been “arrested for drunk driving in the last year” that would mean that, on average, one or two House and Senate members were being arrested each week of 2008. Why haven’t we been seeing big headlines? Could all of the nation’s reporters have missed such a juicy story?

The claims in this e-mail actually originate with a nearly 10-year-old series of articles on a Web site named “Capitol Hill Blue,” which was founded by Doug Thompson, former director of the National Association of Realtors’ political action committee and a former Republican political consultant. …  Capitol Hill Blue “has a history of relying on phony sources, retracting stories and apologizing to its readers.”

… Thompson said his original story referred to “members of current and recent Congresses” back to 1992 (except for the drunk driving claim which referred only to 1998). By and large, however, the figures that are circulating now were pulled, however carelessly, from Thompson’s report.

They followed all that, by the way, with a note about Mark Twain’s quote being wrong.

What’s funny about this story is that it is now being attributed on various right-wing blogs to new people — Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. I don’t know if, as the blogs claim, they cited these figures in an LA Times article, but if they did, well, shame on them.

Moving on…