PolitiFact's Politi-Choice, Part 2

The number of PolitiFact (PF) detractors who yelled “foul” at its choice for 2011 Lie of the Year could make a whole new blog page, there were so many. In Part 1 of this post, there’s displayed a cartoon someone even created about it.

In the course of my research, I found what is believed to be the first “claim” that Medicare was ending, before the Democrats decided to really publicize it. It was from the Wall Street Journal in an article by Naftali Bendavid: (emphasis added)

…The plan would essentially end Medicare, which now pays most of the health-care bills for 48 million elderly and disabled Americans, as a program that directly pays those bills. Mr. Ryan and other conservatives say this is necessary because of the program's soaring costs. Medicare cost $396.5 billion in 2010 and is projected to rise to $502.8 billion in 2016. At that pace, spending on the program would have doubled between 2002 and 2016.

Then there were some (like Dave Weigel at Slate), as noted by PolitiFact, who believed the choice of PLOTY was because of the lobbying efforts of Paul Ryan, who upon learning of the nominees, posted a YouTube video asking viewers to vote for the Ryancare ending Medicare claim in PF’s poll. It seems he might not have known that it was the PF editors who make the final selection, not the winner of the poll. But we don’t know that he may have called PF’s Washington Bureau, or asked constituents to call, or made other lobby efforts behind the scenes.

Along with Weigel, Matt Ygelsias at Slate had a pretty good review called “PolitiFact lies about lying.”

It seems the most “noticed” and quoted PolitiFact detractor was Paul Krugman at the New York Times, who stated that this choice was “awful” in a memorial obit entitled “RIP PolitiFact.” Without much ado, he hit upon the real reason:

The answer is, of course, obvious: the people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there’s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they’ve bent over backwards to appear “balanced” — and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.

Well, perhaps useless and irrelevant to Paul Krugman until the next time they make a Democrat statement Lie of the Year? Or call a blatant Pants on Fire on whoever the Republican candidate is next year as he campaigns against Obama? Because to dismiss PolitiFact on the basis of this one ruling is vastly under-rating it, however one may agree with Krugman’s assessment.

Media Matters published quite an extensive response to PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year, lending support to my contention that the Stimulus creating zero jobs claim should have been the winner, by not just pointing out the other PolitiFact rulings on it as uttered by others, but linking an additional ten examples, such as the publications Washington Times (9/7/11) and Washington Examiner (8/22/11), and well-known conservative pundits like Sean Hannity (video 7/13/11), Laura Ingraham (video 2/4/11) and Charles Krauthammer (video 5/31/11).  From the Media Matters article:

When asked about his explanation about the "zero jobs" lie by Media Matters' Joe Strupp, Adair said that the Lie of the Year "is a subjective decision of Politifact editors. ... [I]t's not based on data points."

Given how often the lies about the stimulus and the Obama apology tour were repeated by conservatives, it may have been helpful for Politifact to look at "data points" rather than just their editors' "subjective" sense of how widespread the lie was.

Data points? How does one determine how “widespread” a lie is without data points? I discussed data points in terms of the number of rulings in my previous post. The number of rulings that PolitiFact does relating to the economy, such as jobs, taxes, budgets, the deficit, far exceed those about healthcare and Medicare. I suppose the judgment of how “widespread” a lie is has to do with what might be termed its “urban mythology”—how it seems to have made an impact culturally, how much it has become accepted as a common belief. The first Lie of the Year, Sarah Palin’s death panel claim, is definitely in that genre.

But how does the public get informed in order for a myth to get rooted? I’m thinking it’s perhaps an “image” that the claim conjures up in peoples’ minds. The “image” makes the claim compelling, gives the claim a unique “brand”. In 2009, it was this board of faceless people having a meeting and saying who would live and who would die. In 2010, it was the incompetent socialist government taking over, bullying doctors and allowing the patient no choices. In 2011, it was…grandma getting thrown over the cliff. The “stimulus creating zero jobs” does not have any memorably associated image except maybe a Democrat congress and Obama throwing money down a toilet, but that’s not unique in that it could be associated with the debt ceiling or the deficit as well. So maybe I’ve seized upon a possible reason for its choice, on the other hand, it doesn’t always have to be the“granny off the cliff” lie that’s the most widespread.

But I digress. The list of complainants is extensive. I’ve already recorded a few of them above: Slate, Media Matters and Krugman at the New York Times. Many of the others have already been included in my page PolitiFact Detractors, although not linked to their latest PolitiFact “detraction.” Here they are in alphabetical order.  There's probably many more, but these are some of the "best" ones.

PolitiFact's Politi-Choice, Part 1

My only response on this blog so far to PolitiFact’s 2011 Lie of the Year was a “guest post” by my favorite vulgarian “Rude Pundit” Lee Papa, who over all the colorful expletives called it over-compensating and pandering by PolitiFact.

I should have listened to my original gut feeling back in July that the Democrat claim that "RyanCare" was ending Medicare was a choice by default for 2011 PolitiFact (PF) Lie of the Year because of its sort of inverse relationship to the 2010 Lie of the Year (that Obamacare was a government takeover). But the Republican claim that Obama’s Stimulus created zero jobs—in the year of Occupy Wall Street and what seemed to be the paramount issue with voters--unemployment--as the Republican primary candidates made their bids, appeared to overshadow the RyanCare claim. It won in PolitiFact’s voting canvass as well. But as I noted in my prediction, PolitiFact may surprise us all…and they did. Although I was hoping the liberal-bias-complainers would be ignored, they weren’t. While it was a good choice, the stimulus created zero jobs was a better one. It was just that this was more of a “politi-choice” decision, pure and simple.

Paul Ryan and Bill Adair in this cartoon version of an analogy by Steve Benen of theWashington Monthly

Making my case from PolitiFact’s own rulings for the year 2011, there were 33 PolitiFact rulings on the subject of “Medicare.” The total number of rulings under the subject “stimulus” was 21 and for “jobs” it was 85. In other words, there were three times as many fact-checks devoted to jobs and the stimulus than to Medicare. If you include similar major topics, for example, healthcare along with Medicare, and the economy along with jobs and stimulus, jobs, stim and economy (246 fact-checks) still outnumber Medicare and healthcare (166 fact-checks). So clearly, jobs was a hotter topic this year than Medicare and healthcare. The economy, in fact, was the number one most fact-checked topic at 140 rulings.

On the other hand, PolitiFact might make its case by virtue of the Truth Index: Medicare scored the lowest, a negative 43.06, of the 20 topics that comprised just over 75% of all 2011 PolitiFact rulings. The topic stimulus had 21 rulings with a very close negative 40.48; jobs, however, scored a negative 12.35, which aligns with the overall 2011 Truth Index average of negative 14.38.

PolitiFact also listed nine rulings about the same subject that had been published, along with the original one by the DCCC. While I don’t have nine to refute PF’s nine exactly, the “stimulus created zero jobs” message as a PF fact-check on the Republicans has been going on for almost two years now, starting with Scott Brown...then later with Rick Scott when he was running for governor of Florida, which was one of the nominees for PolitiFact’s 2010 Lie of the Year...then Eric Cantor in May said the Stimulus failed to get people back to work, which is pretty much the same thing...then Rick Perry on the campaign trail in September...before the National Republican Senatorial Committee used it in an ad, which was PF's official nomination of the fact-check for the 2011 Lie of the Year. Most recently New Jersey governor Chris Christie used it, but in a different tack, as if there never was a stimulus.  Or, there were just claims that not only were zero jobs created, but jobs were lost.

And then there was a blatant flip-flop in the respect that there were a couple claims about the “high” Stimulus cost per job: the number $278,000 is bandied about a lot by John Boehner and the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is a bit confusing since saying it cost that much per job means admitting that 2.4 million jobs were saved or created.  So, which is it?

My own review of this claim, called “RyanCare: Pay or Die” back in April, placed this claim firmly on the roll of “Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style”—because “the available evidence is insufficient to establish it as either true or false.” I wondered in my write-up what it would be when the last baby boomer died off; I also wondered about the “voluntary” aspect of the program. If years out, you have a lot of Medicare-eligible people without insurance, has it not ended for them?

PolitiFact 2011 Lie of the Year: Guest Post

By Lee Papa, also known as The Rude Pundit

CAUTION:  Language used in this guest post can be profane and very offensive.  That's why the Rude Pundit's by-line is "Proudly Lowering the Level of Political Discourse."  This post was copied from his blog.

We all know how it goes. We've seen it in a million movies, TV shows, books. We've experienced it again and again. You can be a major cocksman, someone who can walk into a place like the Tampa Mens Club, ripped and hung, and, great glory hole, find a willing mouth in no time flat. But there's that one dude, that one buff, spiky blonde who just rejects you outright. He shuts down your game, he ignores your jokes, he doesn't glance at your pecs while you do some awesome lifts. Nothing. In fact, he tells you flat out in the locker room that he thinks you're full of shit, that you don't turn him on, and "Can you get those shaved balls out of my face?" Now, of course, you could just tell him and his friends, who laugh at his rejection of you, to fuck off, that you don't need 'em, and just ride another pony, but, goddamnit, how dare he not want you? And then you start doing stupid shit to try to get him to see that you are suck-worthy. You tell others how hot you think he is. You try to let him see how much you're checking him out. You laugh at jokes he tells across the room. In other words, you become a pathetic ass. And however cool or hot you may have been, you're just blowing it all away on someone who just doesn't want to fuck you.

This game plays out all the time in Washington, DC. What has a significant part of Obama's first term been other than a sad attempt to get Republicans to see him as worthy of their votes? How has that shaken out? And you remember when National Public Radio decided to start "balancing" its news broadcasts with more conservative viewpoints (which meant really just offering someone to spin the facts All Things Considered was reporting) because Republicans were threatening to defund it? That was actually back in the mid-1990s. Did that end all the "controversy" over its funding?

Back in February of this year, the blog Smart Politics, of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, released a study that said that PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning effort of the St. Petersburg Times to rate the truth of the words of politicians' and others, had assigned "'Pants on Fire' or 'False' ratings to 39 percent of Republican statements compared to just 12 percent of Democrats since January 2010." Another way to put that is that, of all the statements rated so low, Republicans made 76% of them, compared to just 22% of Democrats. You can flounder around for excuses if you want, but the study showed that the nearly the same number of statements from each side was analyzed. So, in order to attack PolitiFact, you can only say that its editors are biased and deliberately choose statements by Republicans that they know will be proven false. It's either that or it's just that Republicans are generally lying motherfuckers, which would be the easy answer.

Of course, like so many who are afraid of being perceived as too liberal and need desperately to be loved by Republicans, PolitiFact has now overcompensated with a completely fucktarded choice for its "Lie of the Year" for 2011: that Democrats lied when they said that "Republicans voted to end Medicare," despite the fact that Republicans voted to make a government-run health insurance program into a private insurance voucher system and just call it "Medicare," when "Medicare," as we know it, would cease to exist. In other words, they voted to end Medicare.

Others have dissected how this supposed "lie" is actually true, and it's been roundly mocked in Left Blogsylvania and Twitterburg.

But PolitiFact's own defense of its decision is obscenely absurd: Democrats are lying because current old people will still have Medicare? But that's called a "phase-out," which you do when you are, you know, ending something. And that it was an "overreach" for Democrats to use the words "kill" or "end" because the program would still exist? Except that it wouldn't exist. It's like PolitiFact used logic out of a Family Guy episode: just because actor James Woods stole Peter Griffin's wallet, he could claim he was Peter Griffin, and everyone is forced to believe it or be accused of lying. (Yeah, yeah, but the Rude Pundit was trying to find an analogy that everyone else hadn't used.)

In fact, one could make the case that in order to call this a "lie," PolitiFact itself has to, for lack of a better word, lie about how Paul Ryan's newfangled Medicare is the same as current Medicare.

Mostly, though, it's pathetic because the whole thing is such pandering to Republicans. And, sorry, dear newspapers concerned about things like "facts" and "reality" and "truth," but they're not gonna fuck you. They tend to only want to fuck themselves.

Sidebar: The PLOTY Thickens

PolitiFact (PF) has just announced its finalists for the “non-coveted” 2011 Lie of the Year. It has led to some interesting speculations by my conservative counterpart and his partner in crime.  So, it's time for my own.

There are ten candidates: four Democrat statements and six Republican. Earlier this year, I had speculated on one of them, a Democratic (DCCC) claim that Republicans had voted to end Medicare, and it indeed made it to the list of nominees:

My educated guess is that PolitiFact (PF) might just make this the 2011 Lie of the Year because they can show (1) Democrats can make PolitiFact Lie of the Year as well, (2) its “inverse” relationship with the 2010 Lie of the Year (that “Obamacare” is a government takeover versus the privatization in “Ryancare”), and (3) the similar label (Obamacare versus Ryancare). The $12,500 is incidental; it is the “voted to end Medicare” that is the focus of the lie and makes it a "contender."

The "ending Medicare" part continues to make the rounds among various Democratic politicians as a “talking point”—for example, at PF Rhode Island and PF Wisconsin—and their debunkings by PolitiFact have caused it to face an avalanche of bias charges from both sides—Conservatives on Obamacare and Liberals on Ryancare.

The other currently popular topic that will be the issue in the coming presidential election campaign is job creation. PolitiFact actually has two contenders (from “Facebook posts” and from the National Republican Senatorial Committee) dealing with job creation: I wouldn’t put it past them to announce a bi-partisan “tie” between these two party-competing fibs. Remember, according to PolitiFact, the winner chosen will be “the one that played the biggest role in the national discourse.”

My money's on "zero jobs" or a tie between
these two.



If it can only be one, the edge would go to the NRSC “The Stimulus created zero jobs.” It should be noted that this one goes back to 2010; Rick Scott, the current Governor of Florida, also received a Pants on Fire for saying something similar, and it was nominated for the Lie of the Year in 2010. Like 2009 and 2010 winners, they were frequently repeated “talking-points” which PolitiFact rated more than once throughout the year.

The Republican side has played this “zero jobs from the Stimulus” to the hilt, and since job creation is a popular meme right now because of Occupy Wall Street, it has eclipsed the so-called Pants on Fire Statement that Ryancare is ending Medicare. It should be noted too, that after a few congressional town halls where the real people (as opposed to tea partiers) showed up to complain, Paul Ryan and those espousing his plan suddenly got pretty quiet (since they knew those were real people/voters complaining).

The problem for PolitiFact is that they have given the Lie of The Year award for two years’ running now to Republicans and now it’s time for a Democrat. In a way, they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t: it looks like they’re deliberately trying to convey they are non-partisan by choosing a Democrat statement, but sticking by their best objective judgments if they give it to a Republican, although looking even more liberally biased. So if they did a tie, they could sort of have the best of both worlds: "we're objective and we're non-partisan."

Sidebar: And the Nominees for PLOTY are...

Well, one nominee.  My educated guess is that PolitiFact (PF) might  just  make this the 2011 Lie of the Year because they can show (1) Democrats can make PolitiFact Lie of the Year as well, (2) its “inverse” relationship with the 2010 Lie of the Year (that “Obamacare” is a government takeover versus the privatization in “Ryancare”), and (3) the similar label (Obamacare versus Ryancare). The $12,500 is incidental; it is the “voted to end Medicare” that is the focus of the lie and makes it a "contender."

The "ending Medicare" part continues to make the rounds among various Democratic politicians as a “talking point”—for example, at PF Rhode Island and PF Wisconsin—and their debunkings by PolitiFact have caused it to face an avalanche of bias charges from both sides—Conservatives on Obamacare and Liberals on Ryancare.

Both deal with that slippery slope of ideological beliefs with regard to where it slides into that abyss of the unknown, a.k.a. the death panel (which was the 2009 Lie of the Year), as Republicans would like you to believe, where a government-appointed panel decides that you’re too old and unstable, or your condition too far gone, to give you care….or is it going to be the death panel of the free market: if you can’t afford healthcare, you die. (That’s really what Democrats need to emphasize: we have death panels today, they are the medical directors at insurance companies who for the sake of profit deny the insured treatments that might save their life, and the 44,000 people estimated to die annually simply because they cannot afford health insurance.  I'd also like to get into the fact that there is no, and never will be, a free market in healthcare, but that's another long post.)

This will be close to or at the heart of the 2012 presidential debate, and part of any local elections that may go on this year; it's already shown to be a major factor on why the Republicans had some come uppance from the Democrats in several special elections in May, particularly one in upstate New York where the voters were predominantly Republican.   It’s why the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called for a vote on Paul Ryan’s Budget. So unless something else big happens between now and the end of the year 2011, that’s the one that has my vote….and I think we’ll hear more about it again once this debt ceiling charade is over.