YET ANOTHER BREATH OF HOT AIR


from senator make stuff up.

Remember late last year, when Senator Breath of Fresh Air made a habit of lying (or pandering, or both) to his audiences, telling them that there are more young black men in prison than in college, when in fact the numbers (193,000 vs. 530,000) weren't even close?

Well, here he goes again:

A certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia. There's a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year. If you have people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh ginning things up, it's not surprising that would happen.

There are several things wrong with this argument -- the sophomoric conflation of correlation and causality, the lazy, sleazy insinuation that blowhards like Dobbs and Limbaugh incite real violence -- but the biggest is this: it's just not true.

Slate's Mickey Kaus has the breakdown here. The most recent FBI hate crime stats show a 14% increase from 2005 to 2006, and a total increase of only 35% from 2003 to 2006. The FBI -- as you can see here, on its Civil Rights-Hate Crime web site -- hasn't even published its hate crime statistics for 2007 yet. Unless they're leaking information to the Obama Campaign, and unless that information shows hate crimes against Hispanics rose three hundred percent faster in the last year than they did in the previous three combined, then Senator Make Stuff Up has once again proven that among the things he's most eager to change this election year are cold, hard facts.

In a week when Scott McClellan reminds us what can happen when a President prefers facts of his own making to those that actually exist, it is also worth remembering that at cynical, self-righteous times like these, the Audacity of Hope can look and feel (and smell) an awful lot like the Mendacity of Bush.

UPDATE 6/4:
The source of Senator Make Stuff Up's claim appears to be a recent report by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, which found that hate crimes against Hispanics more than doubled from 2006 to 2007. In Tennessee. Not in Florida, where he was speaking. Or in the nation as a whole, as he implied. Total number of offenses rose from 14 to 47. Which means they constituted 10.6% of the total offenses. Or roughly 1% more than the total number of offenses against whites. From 2005 to 2006, they fell by 26%. From 19 to 14. The same report also found that hate crimes against the disabled in Tennessee rose 3,000% (from 1 to 30) between 2006 to 2007.

I wonder whose fault that is.

Posted: Sat - May 31, 2008 at 02:27 PM          

©