Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Paul Nichols Scores Big!!! Oh, Never Mind

I was cleaning up my blog tonight and noted that I hadn't posted this from last week. It was pretty funny so I thought I'd go ahead.

Paul Nichols has "Scored Big", according to BVBL, who is so afraid of me correcting his mistakes that he STILL won't let me READ his blog.

According to BVBL, a highly placed covert operative has told him that Mark Warner has given ONE MILLION DOLLARS to Paul Nichols to run for the 51st district. Well, BVBL actually said:

I’ve heard that Mark Warner has donated one million dollars to the campaign of Paul Nichols for Delegate. That is an unprecedented campaign war chest for a House of Delegates race in Prince William County.

Do Democrats smell blood in the water?

OK, there's a few problems with this. First of all, Does BVBL REALLY believe that Mark Warner could give ONE MILLION DOLLARS for a delegate race, and NOBODY in the press would have heard about it?

Second, that somehow HE would have been told, as an EXCLUSIVE? I mean, how gullible do you have to be to "break" the story of a million-dollar donation?

Third, you don't throw a million dollars at a race that's going to be easy. NLS notes this is a tough race for Republicans in any case, and supposedly Faisal was going to be the easy candidate. If the Democrats WERE putting a million dollars into the race, it would be because they thought it would be a tough race, not an easy one.

Anyway, a person with a smidgen of common sense, and the slightest concern for his reputation as a truth-teller, would have waited to confirm something like this before broadcasting it to the world.

But we aren't talking about that kind of person, we are discussing the BVBL blog, where being first is MUCH more important than being right.

Most of his commenters tried to correct him, but BVBL stood by his story:

Let’s see what the next campaign finance report brings. My source on this has been rock solid in the past.


Eventually, BVBL came to his senses, and he reported:

UPDATE: After running this rumor down, it appears instead that Paul Nichols has established a million dollar budget for his campaign, and Mark Warner has recently made a contribution in support of that budget. Although I don’t know the actual amount of the contribution, it was substantially less than a million dollars.

Thus confirming that BVBL will report completely baseless, unfounded speculation, and only later will BVBL bother to check if there is ANY truth at all to what he is reporting. Which explains how he twice got simply facts about the RPV plan wrong, and also probably explains why BVBL is being sued for false statements.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Charles, you're absolutely correct. Greg L. at BVBL is detestably irresponsible. Almost every time I've read his posts it appears he has asserted things that turn out to be false, or at best, speculative. Worse, they were all unnecessarily so since he could relatively easily have checked them out for accuracy with a modest amount of investigation. Yet, his only defence seems to be that people read his blog more than others, as if the fact that people are fascinated by a car wreck makes car wrecks a socially valuable and desirable occurrence that we should encourage. On the Mark Warner million dollar post he confirmed irrevocably that he's an idiot. How could anyone claiming to have any knowledge of local politics not been sufficiently skeptical of that information to investigate it before posting it. Even the idea that Paul Nichols would have a $1 million campaign budget seems improbable. Its more likely that his "rock solid" source (who I expect has fed him lousy information in the past) tried to save some face with that spin. Really, how could Greg possibly have bought the $1 million thing!

Greg L. really is a disgrace and hurts our party, whether we're conservatives or moderates. At the very least he needs to be ostracized by party members. Even better he needs to be taught that there are serious repercussions for acting irresponsibly. What is the status of the lawsuit against him and is there a way to contribute to its prosecution?

Charles said...

Paul Nichols could have set a million-dollar budget.

The last race between Hilda Barg and Jeff Frederick had each of them over a half-million dollars.

People do love car wrecks. People will watch a car chase for hours on the off chance the car ends up running into something. People also love to talk dirt and rumor, my guess is because you don't have to really know anything to speculate about things. Scandal drives up blog hits which makes your ads more valuable.