Prophecy Fulfilled...Ha ha!

Well, I guess they did it, as I predicted about a month ago.  I watched Angie Drobnic-Holan talk about it on Jake Tapper's Show on CNN (above pic is a snippet).  Now, I must say, if she's going to say previous rulings on Obama saying the same thing should  "both be Pants on Fire" I suppose she could go back and change the previous Half True to Pants on Fire so my conservative counterpart doesn't have a cow?  She explained it as a progression from an inconclusive to a verifiable, just as I did in my post. 

 

Anyway, this year it seemed pretty obvious and now I kind of see how they pick them:  notoriety associated with the claim seems to hold more importance than prevalence of fact-checking the claim; that is, even if it's repeated quite a bit (as well as fact-checked), if there's a lot of publicity surrounding it, or I suppose you might call it, getting a lot of Lexis-Nexis results may matter more.

 

But Obama's had a bad year in 2013, and perhaps PolitiFact wanted to give it some credence.

PolitiFact 2013 Lie of the Year?

As the end of the year approaches, I've started thinking about PolitiFact's 2013 Lie of the Year. Are they even going to do it again this year? Was it Bill Adair's "thing" and not Angie Drobnic-Holan's? Well, if they do, it seems to me there's one very, very strong candidate. That's Obama's repeated statement that under Obamacare, "if you like your current insurance plan, you can keep it"....conveniently changed to... "you can keep (your plan) if it hasn’t changed since the law passed." Making it Pants on Fire.

Let's look at the history of how PolitiFact rated the "if you like your current insurance plan, you can keep it" statement from Obama:

During Obama's campaign in 2008, he was actually given a True: but at that time, his vision of that which came to be known as Obamacare was much different than what it turned out to be. Things were a bit different at the fledgling PolitiFact as well, as this True ruling was a brief 267 words. The important paragraph which shows how things had changed was this one:

Obama has said he would like his plan to be universal, in that everyone has health care coverage. But currently it includes a mandate only for children. Obama has said that he did not include a mandate for adults so as not to penalize people with modest incomes.

This was a far cry from what it developed into after he was elected president.  "The mandate for adults" was practically the heart of the healthcare proposal which survived to the law itself, meaning that, at the time,"keeping your healthcare plan" was more likely than not. 

In 2009, before the ACA was even passed, and oops, Obama said it again. But now there was a mandate for adults  This was when there was a lot of debate in congress over adding a "public option", a sort of Medicare for those under age 65, and the details had still not been finalized.  This time the Truth-o-Meter throttled down half way on Obama:

Until the legislation gets closer to a final stage, it's difficult to say how many employers will likely opt to change coverage. But clearly some change is coming. It's not realistic for Obama to make blanket statements that "you" will be able to "keep your health care plan." It seems like rhetoric intended to soothe people that health care reform will not be overly disruptive. But one of the points of reform is to change the way health care works right now. So we rate Obama's statement Half True.

Fast forwarding to 2013, as the reality of Obamacare rolled out, he was prudently advised he had better "tweak" it and put some caveats on it...like, if your insurance has the coverages the ACA requires, you can keep it.  If your insurance company won't upgrade it, then you might get cancelled...or your rates adjusted accordingly. Obama chose to back peddle, however: "What we said was, you can keep (your plan) if it hasn't changed since the law passed."

So it went from let's give Obama the benefit of the doubt (True), to we don't have enough information (Half True) to "oh no you don't!" (Pants on Fire).

The qualifiers having made it a Pants on Fire lie, and with PolitiFact in a special report including a compilation of 37 recorded occasions where Obama said it without the qualifier, what we now have is a pretty humongous lie. Along with the start-up failures of the healthcare.gov website we have quite a Lie of the Year combustible combination.

Last year, a Republican got the honor, and it was for something that was capturing the public's attention at the height of the presidential campaign. But this year, the Democrats are over due, and it might be okay to go back to the subject of healthcare, since that's dominated the Lie of the Year position since PolitiFact created the award. 

 

The announcement is right around the corner, and the timing could not be better. So it's my prediction. We'll see in a few weeks.

A Note About My Absence

As some friends, acquaintances and readers may have noticed, I haven't been doing a whole lot so far this year at this blog.  I haven't been doing too much commenting on the PolitiFact Facebook page, either, or surveying my nemesis' work as is my usual custom.  After the election I had grown a little weary of politics in general and decided to take a brief sabbatical.  At the same time, PolitiFact was pretty much doing the same, particularly at National level, where they did very few rulings.  But January came and went, and I was having trouble getting my butt back in gear.

In February at the encouragement of a YouTube acquaintance, I decided to give a try at making a "non-personal" video--that is, instead of another video about my cats or my travels, as I had already uploaded to YouTube, I made one about an even more controversial subject than politics.  I first revved up my Windows 7 Movie Maker skills by doing an "amusing and double-entendred" religous sign video, followed by a lengthier video responding to another YouTuber.  That video concerned Biblical slavery.

 

Many videos on YouTube are what can best be described as "Vlogs"--the video blog, the next step up from the blog, where the YouTuber videotapes herself or himself speaking at various lengths on certain subjects.  That's also the easiest way to do it: a camera, webcam or smartphone can easily record and upload a video in just a few easy steps. (Although I consider it difficult in respect to keeping on topic and communicating well.)  My "YouTube Style" is a bit more sophisticated.  I generally splice other videos together as a response to another video:  I research for other videos which may answer the "question" or "opinion" of the video I've targeted for response, especially if it comes from experts who are known in that field.  I try to match one expression to its opposing expression for some congruity.  So I have to use the Movie Maker to clip each video, as well as adding an intro and a closing, where I have to list any credits in case I use music or a some other copyrighted material in making my point.  Occasionally I may add some audio I've recorded where I provide any needed explanation(s).

 

The Biblical slavery video was noticed by a "hub" YouTube site which "mirrored" it and it's  received almost 1,000 views.  While that's not 1.4 billion like Psy of "Gangnam Style"  it's given me some confidence in my ability to produce an interesting, quality video.  I've done a few more using Corel Video Studio, an "upgrade" to  Windows 7 Movie Maker.  More learning pains and time lost to this blog.

 

So that's become a sort of hobby of mine, and of course, it's apparent I can do that with PolitiFact's rulings as well.   So I've finally gotten back to compiling the rulings for the first quarter of 2013, and when I am finished I really want to attempt to do a "PolitiFact Rulings and Truth Index" video for YouTube to be shared with this blog.

 

 In the course of my foray into video editing (which is really what I do) I've also learned from some YouTube Christian apologists and counter-apologists (YouTube has a large loud atheist community) much more about logical fallacies, where they are often employed, and are probably used to some excess by my conservative counterpart.  So, I may be renewing PolitiFact Bias and Zebra Factcheck criticisms from this perspective, although this will be more occasional as I want to concentrate on my efforts on the database of PolitiFact rulings, now approaching 7,000 in count. 

 

So, I'm not done here, and I will be back in a different, hopefully more interesting way.  Thanks for your support!