Washington Post Calls Out Chamber Of Commerce

The past few months have not been so kind to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  With members leaving in protest over the Chamber's anti-science stance on climate legislation and its inflated membership numbers exposed, the group now has its back against the wall.  But despite the torrent of criticism, the powerful business group is not backing down from attacking opponents or for that matter, the truth.  However, its lies continue to be exposed.

In a scathing editorial, the Washington Post called the Chamber out on their blatant distortions of the Post's analysis of transportation issues in Northern Virginia to claim that the newspaper endorsed Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell's transportation agenda. 

The TV ads, matched by a similar radio spot, rely heavily on an editorial we wrote in July about Virginia's transportation mess. In it, we credited Robert F. McDonnell, the Republican nominee, for the specificity of his road-building plan but noted in the very next sentence: "Unfortunately, the new revenue he identifies is one-time-only, many years distant or paltry."

We went on to skewer Mr. McDonnell's plan, both in that editorial and in a half-dozen others since then, as a sham whose torrent of words tries to mask the fact that it would produce little new money for roads -- this as the state's spending on secondary and urban roads in Northern Virginia is fast approaching zero. The Chamber's ad tries to leave the false and dishonest impression that The Post has backed Mr. McDonnell's ideas on transportation; we haven't.

Not only does the Chamber misrepresent the facts on partisan grounds, but its support of McDonnell's plan to improve Virginia's infrastructure without an increase in taxes actually goes against the analysis of the business community in Northern Virginia. The Post notes:    

What is most astonishing about the Chamber's ads is not that they twist a newspaper's editorial line for the Chamber's own purposes. It's that they are at odds with the interests of business itself -- supposedly, its own constituents. In a resolution published Oct. 1, a coalition of 17 of the biggest business groups in Northern Virginia explicitly embraced new taxes as the only rational means of getting roads built; in other words, it echoed Mr. Deeds's own stance. The groups also said that ruling out new taxes, as Mr. McDonnell has done, "is not prudent."

The Post concludes:

In positioning itself as an arm for the Republican Party, the Chamber has cast doubt on its own credibility.