Card Check: Key Committee Now Misrepresents WSJ’s Opposition
Monday, March 23, 2009Last week (in the post, “Card Check: Persuasion through Misrepresentation”) we hammered the SEIU and the left-wing website Think Progress for blatant misrepresentation of a line in a Wall Street Journal editorial opposing the Employee Free Choice Act. The SEIU seized on this sentence in the WSJ’s editorial, “Unionize or Die“:
- “The bill doesn’t remove the secret-ballot option from the National Labor Relations Act but in practice makes it a dead letter.”
And they turned it into:
- “The bill doesn’t remove the secret-ballot option from the National Labor Relations Act,” wrote the WSJ.
The union reversed the meaning of the sentence by citing only half of it. There’s a term for this kind of misrepresentation: dishonest.
So imagine our surprise to see the same misrepresentation to be the lead item on the House Education and Labor Committee’s homepage, a piece headlined, “Take Chairman Miller’s Quiz of the Week.” There’s a slight nod to the editing through the use of the ellipsis, but otherwise, it’s the same distortion of the WSJ’s point.
The committee’s blogger, Mike Kruger, liked the falsehood so much he featured it as a blog item on homepage, too.
When propagandizing, organized labor has only a passing acquaintance with the facts. One expects the bluster, bullying, lies, etc., although the SEIU’s distortion was unusually obvious.
But when a major committee with direct legislative authority over the issue endorses and spreads this misrepresentation, well, it is a shock.
Still, opponents should take heart. If supporters of the Employee Free Choice Act feel compelled to fundamentally misrepresent the case against it, they obviously lack confidence in their cause. EFCA-advocates know they’re losing, so the distortions and desperation mount.
UPDATE (5:13 p.m.): Brian Peck at the U.S. Chamber takes note, “Card Check - Fun With Quizzes.” He adds: “// Update: They actually sent this out as a Committee E-Newsletter. Crazy games.” David Freddoso at National Review’s The Corner also knocks the deception.
[...] Check out the details here. [...]
Here’s a proposal – new punctuation marks: contextual braces {}. Braces to bound text that is meant as atomic, that is, indivisible; so that quoting only a part will distort the meaning imparted by the whole. Contextual marks used by the author embrace text that shouldn’t be quoted in part. Recommendation: to be used to combine not more than a few sentences: joining whole swaths of paragraphs would dilute their purpose.
[...] unionization, it is unsurprising that supporters of the Employee Free Choice Act would engage in this sort of deceptive editing exercise. Both the SEIU and House Labor Committee Chairman George Miller have now taken this sentence from a [...]
[...] ShopFloor, via the [...]
[...] Shop Floor is reporting once again on the lies that the SEIU is using to try and cajole people into thinking that the Wall [...]
[...] Shop Floor is reporting once again on the lies that the SEIU is using to try and cajole people into thinking that the Wall [...]
[...] Shop Floor is reporting once again on the lies that the SEIU is using to try and cajole people into thinking that the Wall [...]
[...] Shop Floor is reporting once again on the lies that the SEIU is using to try and cajole people into thinking that the Wall [...]
[...] labor front group, American Rights at Work, has joined the SEIU, the House Ed & Labor Committee, and the lefty activists at Think Progress in a dishonest and cynical distortion of the Wall Street [...]
[...] misquoted and distorted a sentence in an editorial. As we’ve noted several times (here and here), the Journal’s sentence was [...]
[...] ballot is untrue and that “The Wall Street Journal has said that that is a lie.” Again, “demonstrably false” as the SEIU, which had again stretched the truth. In fact, the newspaper took the rather [...]
[...] ballot is untrue and that “The Wall Street Journal has said that that is a lie.” Again, “demonstrably false” as the SEIU, which had again stretched the truth. In fact, the newspaper took the rather [...]
[...] secret ballot is untrue and that “The Wall Street Journal has said that that is a lie.” Again, “demonstrably false” as the SEIU, which had again stretched the truth. In fact, the newspaper took the rather [...]
[...] secret ballot is untrue and that “The Wall Street Journal has said that that is a lie.” Again, “demonstrably false” as the SEIU, which had again stretched the truth. In fact, the newspaper took the rather [...]
[...] secret ballot is untrue and that “The Wall Street Journal has said that that is a lie.” Again, “demonstrably false” as the SEIU, which had again stretched the truth. In fact, the newspaper took the rather [...]