Politifact's lie of the year is the DCC claim (via ad) that the republicans voted to "end Medicare". And Krugman's assessment of this is a huge loss of credibility as result of Politico's desire to appear non partisan.
In order to design a statement to Politico's liking, we'd have to add "as we know it" as an added qualifier. Those four words (really semantics, if you will) are what stands between Politico's "lie of the year" and a 100% factual statement.
Now imagine, a car.
It runs well, fuel efficient. So fuel efficient, that no other car available gets this kind of MPG. And it's Dependable but not pretty, by any means.
Now imagine, someone steals the car from you.
The next day the police call, informing you that they've (they think) found your car. You arrive at the impound garage to find what's left of your car. It's been completely stripped. What only remains, is just barely the frame. And even that's been chopped up.
And while what remains of your car is completely non functional, you can still very euphemistically refer to it, as a car. The Police called it a car, when they informed you they found it. What else could they say? "Mr. Jones, we found your partial unibody and we'd like you to get it out of our impound".
And within that aforementioned parable, lies the intellectual foundation under which republican and Politico reasoning align.
Great Politico. Good for you. That carcass of my old car, is still in fact a car. Even though you'll have to pay someone to haul it off to the scrapyard. Rest assured, as soon as it gets there, the people working there will unabashedly refer to it, under the more generic nomenclature. Junk.
Because it will never be a functioning car. Ever again.