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Lanny Davis Redefines 'undisputed'

... and "facts" for that matter. When you title your Huffington Post piece "The Top Ten List of Undisputed Facts Showing Barack Obama's Weakness in the General Election Against John McCain," you probably don't want the first sentence of item number one to be demonstrably false: "Hillary Clinton won by 10%, 220,000 votes."

But creative rounding up from less than 9.5% and 215,000 is small beer compared to some of the subsequent howlers Davis offers. There are the twin assertions of numbers 4 and 5, for instance ("Most of [Obama's] ads were personal negative attack ads against Senator Clinton, meaning attacks on her character and integrity" and "There were no personal attack ads run by Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania," respectively). There's the claim that "rural voters" are one of the "core constituencies in the Democratic base." There's the assertion that "Current polls show Senator Clinton runs ahead of John McCain nationally or dead even -- and Senator Obama runs only dead even," followed by a cherry-picked USA Today poll. (In fact, while Hillary runs better than Obama against McCain according to that poll and the AP/Ipsos poll, Obama outperforms Clinton--and by wider margins--according to ABC/Washington Post, Reuters/Zogby, and Cook/RT Strategies; in RealClearPolitics's poll of polls Obama currently edges out Clinton's performance by just under a percentage point.)

I could go on, but what's the point? Davis is either a hack who's happy to peddle "facts" he knows are false and/or misleading, or he's an utter moron. I'm generous enough to assume the former.

--Christopher Orr