David Barton, pseudo-historian and Talibangelical liar
How can you tell when pseudo-historian and Talibangelical Christian extremist David Barton is lying again?
Well, I'll leave you to fill in the obvious punchline, but Barton epitomises the old adage that when you show the world you know you need to lie for your faith, you show the world you know your faith needs fools to believe falsehoods. As Mark Twain said, "Lying is trying to fool someone into believing something you know ain’t so!"
The question is, why does David Barton and his extremist Christian supporters need Americans to believe something they know ain’t so? The answer is because they don't want them believing things they know are so, of course.
In his latest series of lies, he is touring the USA ahead of the midterm elections trying to fool the faithfooled into voting for anyone who believes Thomas Jefferson's 'wall of separation between church and state' is artificial and should be torn down as surely as the Berlin Wall, so Christians can take the place they feel entitled to, at the heart of a self-appointed theocracy in which the likes of David Barton will play a leading part, without all those bothersome elections and the risk of not getting elected by the people they govern.
His latest lie is that 'when the churches ran the communities, the turnout at elections was 100%'. The big lie is, of course, that the churches ran the communities (i.e., governed the nascent USA). He then abuses statistics and shows he is deliberately confusing turnout with votes cast. Not surprisingly he shows that 100% of the votes cast were by people who cast votes. What he doesn't say is how many of those eligible to vote stayed at home - the true measure of turnout, because the apocryphal accounts he is promulgating simply never give that figure. His figure of 5000 voters is nothing more than an assumption, slipped in in the knowledge that none of his audience will bother to check.
Perhaps he feels the distinction is too subtle for the fools he is seeking to mislead. Like all successful con artists, he is contemptuous of his marks and knows full well that they'll swallow anything they want to believe, mistakenly thinking it comes from a real academic historian whose veneer of pious honesty is genuine.
For example, he claims that when Daniel Webster stood in the Congressional election in 1824, he got 4990 votes and his opponent got just 10 - which must have been his family voting for him. Barton gives no source, nor does he say how he knows what the size of the electorate was for that election, but he implies that the 5000 votes cast was 100% of the eligible electorate. In fact, it was 100% of the votes cast.
He then asserts that the turnout was 100% for the first 70 years of the nation’s existence, 'because the churches ran the communities". As Kyle Mantyla points out, in fact, as the genuine historian Pauline Maier says in her book, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution., in the 1789 congressional race between James Madison and James Monroe, following ratification of the new constitution, less than 50% of the voters voted.
So with one of the first ever elections having a turnout of about 44%, it's difficult to see where Barton got the figure of 100% for the first 70 years of elections from.When the election was over, Madison acknowledged that without his active campaigning, he would not have beaten the odds and won 1,308 votes to James Monroe’s 972 on February 2, 1789, a snowy election day when most of the district’s 5,189 voters stayed home.
Or rather, it's not at all difficult to see where Barton got the figure from - he made it up, of course. It's a lie, intended to fool people into believing something Barton knows ain’t so.
When you show the world you know your faith is a lie you show the world you know your faith requires fools to believe falsehoods.
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