Tuesday New York Times features a story about leaders of the American Muslim community complaining about the Obama campaign not treating them well enough.
I was struck by one paragraph that didn’t pass my smell test:
In 2006, the Virginia Muslim Political Action Committee arranged for 53 Muslim cabdrivers to skip their shifts at Dulles International Airport in Northern Virginia to transport voters to the polls for the midterm election. Of an estimated 60,000 registered Muslim voters in the state, 86 percent turned out and voted overwhelmingly for Jim Webb, a Democrat running for the Senate who subsequently won the election, according to data collected by the committee.
I then went to the Virginia elections website where they, helpfully, list voter turnout percentages for every since 1976 and discovered that the overall turnout in Virginia in 2006 was 52.7%!
Now the idea that any group had an 86% turnout in any election outside of the old Soviet Union is, of course, totally preposterous. And anybody with any knowledge about poltics would know this. That an advocacy group would try to get away with claiming such clout is common place. But the idea that the New York Times would print such BS is disturbing.