‘Lie Of The Year’ — Aided And Abetted By The Media

PolitiFact has awarded their “Lie of the Year” to President Barack Obama for his promise that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

PolitiFact, a feature of the Tampa Bay Times, purports to rate the truthfulness of statements/assertions made by politicians. The accurate are rated “true,” then slide down the scale to “mostly true,” ‘half true,” “mostly false” and “false.” The biggest “lies” — the most egregious — are awarded, as PolitiFact puts it, a “Pants on Fire!” rating. (Full disclosure: As I recently wrote, PunditFact, its sister feature, recently gave me an undeserved “mostly false.”)

What’s puzzling is that PolitiFact, until now, called Obama’s statement “true” and later “half true.” In 2008 PolitiFact rated then-candidate Obama’s “you can keep it” statement as “true,” because “Obama is accurately describing his health care plan here.” As The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto notes: “PolitiFact actually rated Obama’s promise as ‘true’ on the grounds that in making the promise, he was making the promise. … In 2008 it was but a promise, which Obama might or might not have intended and might or might not have been able to keep.”

Then in 2009, when PolitiFact re-fact-checked the same statement, they rated Obama’s statement as “half true.” The Obamacare promise stayed stuck on “half true” even when PolitiFact again re-re-fact-checked it in 2012.

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