My must read of the day is "Senate Majority PAC’s nonsensical attack ad in Louisiana," by Glenn Kessler, in the Washington Post:
This ad from the Senate Majority PAC, which is run by former aides to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.), is an example of a very deceptive technique: stringing together a variety of true (or semi-true) statements in an effort to completely mislead viewers. […]
Television stations in Louisiana should be ashamed of falling for such an obvious gambit. Individual lines may be true, but the net effect is highly misleading. Surely, the standards for political advertising in Louisiana need to be higher if residents are going to have a civil political debate.
This is the third time in a month that the fact checker has given four Pinocchios to an ad sponsored by Senate Majority PAC. That’s a pretty dreadful track record, and does little for the organization’s credibility more than six months before the midterm elections.
According to almost every Democrat and pundit on the left, ads by Americans for Prosperity are full of lies. Their favorite target in this election cycle so far was an ad featuring Julie Boonstra. It received three Pinocchio’s from the Washington Post, and Democrats ran around saying Boonstra was making a completely bogus claim.
They were making a straw man argument when it came to that ad. The AFP ad made no mention of specific costs. Boonstra simply said my new plan under Obamacare has out-of-pocket costs that make it unaffordable for me.
That’s a relatively subjective claim. Yet Democrats and those on the left ripped it apart as inaccurate—Rep. Gary Peters (D., Mich.) sent out legal letters attempting to stop stations from running the ad.
Since that’s so upsetting to those on the left, you’d think their ads would adhere to a strict code of honesty. They clearly do not. If you look at the track record of organizations on the left you see that they consistently produce and run erroneous ads, seemingly more than the groups on the right—but they aren’t just inaccurate or exaggerated ads; they’re egregiously false.
This is the third time the group (an organization that is supported by Harry Reid) has run an ad that received four Pinocchios—in the last month!
Incase you don’t know about the Pinocchio rating scale: Three Pinocchios means there are "significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions." Four Pinocchio’s is so factually inaccurate they just define it as "whoppers."
If anyone should be sending around legal cease and desist letters it’s the candidates in any race where there’s an ad by the Senate Majority PAC. Their record over the last month should strip them of all credibility.