PolitiFact's Bill Adair doubles down on his 2011 Lie of the Year:
PolitiFact had its latest brush with the Echo Chamber Nation this week. We gave our Lie of the Year to the Democrats' claim that the Republicans "voted to end Medicare." That set off a firestorm in the liberal blogosphere, with many saying that claim was not actually wrong. We've received about 1,500 e-mails about our choice and only a few agreed with us.
Some of the response has been substantive and thoughtful. The critics said we ignored the long-term effects of Rep. Paul Ryan's plan and that we were wrong to consider his privatized approach to be Medicare. In their view, that is an end to Medicare.
We've read the critiques and see nothing that changes our findings. We stand by our story and our conclusion that the claim was the most significant falsehood of 2011. We made no judgments on the merits of the Ryan plan; we just said that the characterization by the Democrats was false.
Let me make this easy for you, Mr. Adair.
Let's say you have a German Shepherd named Max. One day, Max is run over and killed by a drunk driver. You're heartbroken and lonely. To salve your grief, you go out and adopt a Labrador Retriever, and you name him Max.
Now, it is true that you still have a dog named Max. You do not, however, have the same dog that was run over and killed by that drunk driver. It's a different dog named Max.
If the Ryan plan were to become law, we might still have a program called Medicare, but it would not be the same program that was run over and killed by Paul Ryan. It would be a different program that happened to share the same name.
That is, obviously, what Democrats mean when they say the Ryan plan would end Medicare as we know it, because it would. It is not a lie. It is an objectively true statement.
No rational, honest person could conclude otherwise.