No, that is not a partisan statement in that headline. It is a journalistic one.The Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore has a profile of Sharron Angle up today that is riddled from top to bottom with factual errors, as Jon Ralston noted in a Tweet today. That's shocking enough because the WSJ, while possessing a notoriously conservative editorial page, usually does have some regard for facts even there. This piece is stunning in its misinformation and, clearly, most of it comes from Mrs. Angle, a woman who wears her religion on her sleeve but evidently believes that bearing false witness is cool with God. Angle, of course, is the GOP opponent to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
It doesn't take long to get to a whopper. There's one big one in the very first paragraph, where Angle is allowed to state as fact that 30,000 people attended the Searchlight tea party in March. That's 50 percent greater than the highest estimates, coming from tea party partisans, of 20,000. The cops put it around 8,000, so does Sharron Angle think the police are dirty liars? Soon more people will allegedly have been at Searchlight than at the Polo Grounds for Bobby Thompson's homer.
Let's see. What else?
* Angle claims Reid's effort to delay a coal plant in 2009 cost 5,000 jobs. The folks in favor of the plant said it would have created 1,600 construction jobs and 200 permanent ones.
* Angle claims she was at the forefront of fighting the 2003 tax increases at the Legislature, that the governor singled her out and that Republican legislative leaders sought her out to try to get her to swing. Fact is, it was Assemblyman Bob Beers who held together the part of the GOP caucus that held back the two-thirds needed to pass the increases. Nobody would have bothered to bargain with Angle as she describes knowing that she was, as she also proudly describes, an unmovable force. Also, I can't find anywhere online where Gov. Guinn said at the time that anyone opposed to the increases was "irrelevant, irresponsible and cowardly," as the WSJ's Moore puts in quotes.
* The following is an unmitigated, total lie: "She spearheaded a movement to get the Supreme Court replaced. In the next election in 2006, voters threw out five of the seven members of the Nevada Supreme Court; the other two had retired." The controversial Guinn v Legislature decision was decided 6-1. Three of the six, Miriam Shearing, Deborah Agosti and Robert Rose, retired at the end of their next terms (2004 for Shearing and Agosti, 2006 for Rose), and one who perhaps Angle thinks she got to retire, Myron Leavitt, actually died. Only one justice from that group was ever unseated by ballot, Nancy Becker in 2006. In 2008, the one justice who dissented -- that is, who voted as Angle would have liked -- retired. Justice Mark Gibbons, who voted in the 6-1 majority but later repudiated it, was re-elected in 2008.
Two other points:
* Someone needs to tell Sharron she can stop bashing Sue Lowden now or Snow White might not help her convince moderates she's not as bat-shit crazy as Harry Reid says. In the WSJ piece, she says: "We had to have a candidate who would offer a sharp policy contrast. Someone who would not just pay lip service to limited government principles, but had a solid record of voting that way time and again."* Moore says Angle "has Irish red hair." Dude, she's almost 61. It's called henna.
