I never cared about fact checking because I don't believe politicians care about making truthful statements. But now I'm starting to question the political competence of fact checkers.
Unfortunately, Politifact has lost sight of what it was supposed to be doing. Instead of simply saying whether a claim is true, it’s trying to act as some kind of referee of what it imagines to be fair play: even if a politician says something completely true, it gets ruled only partly true if Politifact feels that the fact is being used to gain an unfair political advantage. In the case of Obama’s job statement, Politifact first called it only half true, then upgraded that to mostly true, not because Obama said anything factually incorrect, but because Politifact perceived Obama as trying to imply that he was responsible for the gains.
Seriously? This is politics 101. When things are great you take credit for it. And when things are bad, you blame your opponent for them. There's nothing wrong with this tactic so long as you stick to the facts which was what Obama did in his State of the Union Address. If Obama said that under his tenure, the economy grew in the fourth quarter of 2011,
he would be factually correct. If you don't like the fact that he seems to be taking credit for it then you're not fact checking; you're just expressing your subjective opinion which is something that fact checkers shouldn't be doing. If these guys don't like the way how speeches are written, then they need to get out of the fact checking business, and start working on some campaigns. After all, I'm sure they would be able to craft speeches that would close the partisan divide once and for all!
Honestly, there's no way I can take fact checking seriously if the clowns at Politifact keep acting like beltway political commentators. We don't need more Thomas Friedmans.
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