I know I am wasting my time, I already posted a comment about this and it hasn't received a rec, and the only comment to it was my own PS.
But I think this matters, so I will write a diary about it. So here it is.
We do not know for sure if Obama proposed raising the Medicare age 67...and if he did propose it we do not know how serious he was about it. The reason I know this is because I read the article from which this meme originated...and it relies on 5 unnamed republican and democratic sources...and the Sam Stein, the author, explicitly states
Sources offered varied accounts regarding the seriousness with which the president had discussed raising the Medicare eligibility age.
To be clear, Stein's sources may be entirely correct--Obama may have proposed raising the age for medicare either seriously or less so. I don't know, and we may or may not ever know for sure.
So why does this matter? I think it provides a nice example of how "facts" seem to become facts lately.
Step 1: Sam Stein writes a good, cautious article clearly stating his sources will not go on the record, and notes that they disagree.
Step 2: TPM posts an article that links to Stein's article and gets reaction from Grijalva about the possibility. TPM fails to mention that the 5 sources differed on the seriousness with which Obama raised the issue.
Sam Stein reported that five sources said Obama offered an increase in the Medicare eligibility age -- from 65 to 67 -- in exchange for Republicans moving on increasing tax revenues.
Step 3: TomP (A diarist I respect a great deal) then links to the TPM story, and fun ensues on Daily Kos. To be clear, TomP did not report the allegation as if it was fact. He stated right up front in the diary...
It is a class war and whenever one forgets it, one loses his or her ass.
Take, for example, the widely circulated story of a proposal by President Obama to raise the Medicare age for elegibility to 67 from 65. Supposedly this was proposed in exchange for tax increases, such as letting the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy expire.
But TomP made several critical mistakes. First, he linked to a slightly simplified version of the story on TPM rather than to the original story. Second, while the story is widely circulated, it is only based on the single account from Stein, it is not so much "widely circulated" but really only widely cited and commented upon. Third, TomP and TPM omitted the hesitations about the seriousness of Obama's proposal that were included by Stein in the original article. Those hesitations matter. In fact, the hesitations about the sources are just as important as the claim that Obama might be willing to raise the eligibility age for Medicare.
To be clear, I am not trying to single out TomP for criticism. TPM is also one of my favorite news sources. The point here is that these days many of our facts are the product of a process of distillation. A process that strips the nuance, limitations and hesitations from a story--a process that turns things that might be into facts that are.
And then we finally reach step 4: A pie fight on Daily Kos over something which may or may not be true, with each side claiming to know--for sure--the accuracy of their facts.
We are going to be getting a lot of unsourced claims about the default negotiations in the next few weeks. Lets all note when claims are unsourced and when unnamed sources disagree when we talk about them.
The first requirement of a fact based community is noting when we can be sure of our facts--and when we cannot.