Avik Roy:
10. That thing you didn’t say isn’t true. http://vlt.tc/jw2 Politifact cannot find a fact to rebut in this Crossroads ad regarding the likelihood of employer dumping into the health insurance exchanges, since it relies on numbers from the Congressional Budget Office (the CBO appears a great deal in these fact checks, so it’s a good thing it has never made a mistake or a miscalculation, and all of its predictions come true). So instead they invent “a novel new interpretation of the ad’s meaning” – one surprisingly absent from the ad itself – in order to judge it false.
9. That thing you said is true, but it doesn’t matter. http://vlt.tc/jvp One of my personal favorites: Senior Pinocchio Manager Glenn Kessler admits that the CBO calculates the effect of Obamacare will be 800,000 workers dropping out of the workforce. But this doesn’t matter, you see, because Kessler describes 800,000 jobs as “basically a rounding error”. Kessler does this while simultaneously maintaining that the stimulus had a meaningful and positive effect on jobs – “some jobs were created, and many were saved.” Presumably the Washington Post’s headline had the jobs report shown an 800,000 increase would have been “JOBS INCREASE BASICALLY A ROUNDING ERROR.”
8. That thing you said could maybe be true, but it won’t be soon because things will get better. http://vlt.tc/jw3 FactCheck.org only makes one appearance on this list, and I generally consider them the best of the bunch in terms of the fewest obvious errors. Here, they work to rebut Newt Gingrich’s food stamp president claim. There’s a calculation error here which is key, and I assume FactCheck.org people were likely just calculating based on a misreading of the numbers – they ought to have been comparing 14.55 million (under eight years of Bush) to 14.46 million participants under (at the time) 3 years of Obama – which is not, contrary to their estimates, 444,574 fewer (I have no conceivable explanation for how they found that figure). But this less than 100k difference really sticks in my mind because of the unmitigated spritely optimism of the FactCheck.org review, which claims that things are looking up and that more people will come off the food stamp rolls in the near future, perhaps even tomorrow. Now that we have the latest numbers in hand, we see a total of 46,681,833 people on the rolls – which means Obama added 14.69 million participants to the program on his watch… definitively making Gingrich’s claim correct. http://vlt.tc/3a0 CNN at least had the decent idea of being more honest about their opinion, labeling Gingrich’s claim “true, but not Obama’s fault, because Bushlied.” http://vlt.tc/jw4
7. That thing you said is true but ordinary people will think it’s something false because of your fancy words. http://vlt.tc/jvn Ted Cruz claims national debt is bigger than the nation’s GDP. Yes, our national debt absolutely, incontrovertibly exceeds the nation’s GDP. But claiming that gets you a “Half-True” because Politifact’s Gardner Selby thinks saying it’s True is mean. Unrelated, but did you know the 404 page on Politifact is an Etch-a-Sketch? http://vlt.tc/jvo That’s half-hilarious! Or rather, hilarious to half the country. They also won the Pulitzer Prize.
6. That thing you said isn’t true because we trust this one article we Googled more than official reports. http://vlt.tc/o0 Did you know that no terrorists come into America from Mexico? Pinocchio Distribution Head Glenn Kessler attacked Herman Cain for the claim “We know that terrorists have come into this country by way of Mexico.” According to Kessler, “Cain is wrong. The Houston Chronicle has looked closely at this question and found that *no one arrested at the border* has faced terror-related charges or carried out a terrorist act.” Now of course, as anyone with a brain realizes, that is a very different statement on its face than the one Cain is making. Cain did not say we had *arrested* terrorists at the border. Cain did not say that people *arrested* at the border have carried out terrorist attacks or attempted to do so. Cain’s statement is simply that terrorists have crossed that border. This is supported by, well, the U.S. Department of Justice. http://vlt.tc/o3 And here. http://goo.gl/qqLN3 And here. http://vlt.tc/o1 But what do they know?
Politifact is hopelessly biased.
