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Tuesday, December 20, 2011

PolitiFact Admits "Lie of the Year" Isn't A Lie At All

As you likely already know, PolitiFact has declared the statement "Republicans Voted to End Medicare" their "Lie of the Year" for 2011. A million outraged blogs and media outlets have covered this all the livelong day, but I have to admit I was a bit surprised to discover myself not only that PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" is obviously not a lie, but that PolitiFact declares an equivalent statement to the "Lie of the Year" as "true" in the very piece announcing their ridiculous choice.

Yes, PolitiFact declares the statement "Republicans Voted to End Medicare" their "Lie of the Year," even while declaring in the very article making this announcement that the statement "Republicans Voted to Privatize Medicare" is MOSTLY TRUE (only MOSTLY instead of ENTIRELY TRUE because, according to the Ryan plan Republicans unanimously voted for, today's lucky seniors would not have their own benefits privatized and voucherized even as they meanly and hypocritically voted to do so to younger citizens than themselves).

Let's just look at that for a moment: The "mostly true" statement that Republicans who voted unanimously for the Paul Ryan budget voted to privatize Medicare but then re-brand the transformed result as "Medicare" anyway, even though it would be altogether unlike what Medicare has always actually been, is presumably so different by PolitiFact's reckoning from saying such a transformation would indeed "end Medicare as we know it" that the latter statement is not only no longer "mostly true" but somehow so untrue as to be rate the condemnation of a full-on "Pants on Fire" Lie (the nomenclature is theirs).

On the basis of this ridiculous sleight-of-hand PolitiFact then pretends to ascend above the political fray and indulge the usual "both sides are equally to blame" burlesque of objectivity that is always injurious to the very notion of the fact-checking to which they are presumably devoted, proposing that through this wild lie (that is indistinguishable from variations of the same proposition that they themselves declare true) Democrats are "turning-the-tables" on Republicans and offering up a mirror-image to 2009's PolitiFact Lie of the Year, the straightforwardly paranoid fantasy charge by Republicans that Health Care Reform involved the creation of "Death Panels."

Yes, Politi"Fact" is declaring the claim that voting to privatize Medicare is in fact voting to end the program as we know is equivalent to the claim that voting for Health Care Reform was in fact voting to kill Grandma!

Quite obviously they are not, even on PolitiFact's own accounting. But just as obviously, because they are not, "PolitiFact," in their grandest gesture of the year 2011, risks the reputation ruining impression that they have opted to provide "Polite" cover to liars over "Fact"-checking. Needless to say, they should quickly and publicly re-assess their terrible decision, else stubbornness and shoddy standards render them altogether useless to their own stated purpose.

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