Cookin' The Facts

"Facts," Ronald Reagan famously said, "are stupid things." If you ask long-time Democratic activist and campaign pro Harold Cook, his opinion of the Austin American-Statesman's Politifact enterprise isn't much higher. Cue one of the oddest political feuds in recent Texas history.

In an recent entry of his Letters from Texas blog entitled "Testing the Truth Test", Cook took a swipe at the Statesman's fact-parsing service. While taking some hearty digs at the column ("Efforts to re-name 'PolitiFact Texas' to 'Gotcha, Mo-fo!' were thwarted by Cox Newspapers middle management") he also said that, by undertaking a simple banner exchange with the Statesman, Harvey Kronberg (of Harvey Kronberg's Quorum Report) had shown he had "lost his rabbit-ass mind."

Harvey, classy to the end, dryly responded:

OK, WE ASKED FOR REACTION TO LINKING TO POLITIFACTS
Our thanks to self-proclaimed wit Harold Cook for his measured affirmation of our judgment

"We would list all of Cook's bio and credentials," QR added, "but why bother."

Meeeeee-ow.

Here's a suggestion: Politifact could become the next great party game. Sort of the semantical equivalent of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, where the first person to create a seemingly absolutely logical analysis of any statement made by a politician, campaign pro, analyst, activist or their trash collector gets to take a shot of tequila.

Let's take a recent Politifact decree entitled "La bonne vie? Democratic chairman says Perry is living large, a la Louis XIV." Here the Statesman staffers produced 807 words of copy to debunk a throwaway line from Texas Democratic Party Chair Boyd Richie that Gov. Rick Perry lived like the famous French Sun King. Politifact called pants on fire, but we say we can prove that point in four.

Let's see. Louis XIV was supposed to rule from the Tuileries Palace in Paris, but disliked his old, cold, drafty digs. He never got over an attack on the palace by the mob during the Fronde, so instead he got the state to provide a nice little place called Versailles outside of town. He was very big on sponsoring the arts, especially anything that made his administration look good. Louis also took over and reformed a tax system that was in shambles, but his administrations reforms, combined with extraordinary profligacy, set an economic time bomb under the throne of his successors.

Hey, we made a fact!