My plan was to write this piece first thing this morning but The Washington Examiner’s Sean Higgins went ahead and did it for me. Thursday, the fraudulent fact-check site PolitiFact awarded its “lie of the Year” to Barack Obama for his, “If you like your insurance you can keep your insurance” ObamaCare sales con. But in order to do so, PolitiFact had to rewrite its own history after they spent three years aiding and abetting Obama by spreading this exact same lie:
[I]n an October 2008 column — just before the election — PolitiFact actually rated Obama’s promise as “true.” It said at the time: “Obama is accurately describing his health care plan here. He advocates a program that seeks to build on the current system, rather than dismantling it and starting over.”
In other words, it rated him on the basis of whether he was accurately stating his own campaign promise, a hurdle no politician could fail to clear.
In an August 2009 column, PolitiFact did pull back, noting: “It’s not realistic for Obama to make blanket statements that ‘you’ will be able to ‘keep your health care plan.'”
Since Obama was making just that blanket claim, it ought to have been rated “false,” but PolitiFact decided against that. “[O]ne of the points of reform is to change the way health care works right now. So we rate Obama’s statement Half True,” it ruled. Rather than hold Obama to account, it moved the goalposts instead.
This wasn’t the worst of it. As Higgins notes, PolitiFact not only rewrote the definition of “fact” to rate Obama’s obvious lies as true, but twice during the 2012 election, the phony fact-check site accused of Mitt Romney of lying with his accurate claim that “up to 20 million Americans could lose their insurance under ObamaCare.”
Romney’s statement was based on analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
One of those “false” ratings for Romney came in June of 2012, the same month PolitiFact awarded Obama a “half true” for repeating what PolitiFact now acknowledges was the “lie of the year.”
PolitiFact is one of the biggest frauds on the Internet and the biggest in the mainstream media. As we can see with PolitiFact’s ongoing ObamaCare fraud, PolitiFact’s entire purpose is to protect Democrats and their agenda by spinning lies into truth and truth into lies. The media love PolitiFact because the phony fact-checks give the media a false sheen of objectivity.
On the most consequential domestic policy programs passed by our government in a decade, the charlatans at PolitiFact not only helped spread what they knew was a lie; they then awarded their own lie “lie of the year.”
Shameless and dangerous.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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