I’m sure many of you reading this diary saw Aaron Blake’s column for WaPo’s “The Fix” tut, tutting over AOC’s “very bad defense of her falsehoods.” For Blake, the offending passage occurred during AOC’s interview with Anderson Cooper. In response to Cooper mentioning that WaPo gave her four Pinocchios for her statement regarding Pentagon spending, AOC stated:
If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they’re missing the forest for the trees. I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.
Now, I’ll give Blake a little credit for pointing out that this statement can lead to a “The Ends Justifies the Means” position where factual lies are justifiable for moral reasons. Although, if he was going to mention this fear he probably ought to have mentioned that this has been the operational pattern of the Republican Party since Newt and Co. took over the party in 1994.
But the AOC quote highlighted above isn’t the real reason why Aaron Blake decided that AOC needed a stern talking to from the political press. The money quote is inthe paragraph immediately following the recap of AOC’s Anderson Cooper interview:
Four Pinocchios is not a claim that Glenn Kessler and The Post’s Fact Checker team give out for bungling the “semantics” of something. It’s when something is a blatant falsehood. It’s the worst rating you can get for a singular claim.
The problem isn’t whether or not AOC’s statement is misleading, it’s that she wasn’t contrite before PolitiFact’s verdict of “Four Pinocchios.” How dare she insinuate that PolitiFact, with it’s emphasis on the technical gray areas between rhetorical, factual, careless statements, is anything but an impartial arbiter of truth and falseness in American Politics.
Which Brings me to AOC’s very public Twitter discussion with the editors of PolitiFact regarding their pages for herself and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Under the heading “All Statements from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” PolitiFact lists six statements. The first statement listed was made on 7/6/18 and the last statement was made on 12/3/18. Of the six statements one is rated mostly true, four are rated false, and one is rated “Pants on Fire.”
Under the heading “All Statements from Sarah Huckabee Sanders,” PolitiFact lists six statements. The first statement listed was made on 3/5/17 and the last statement was made on 11/28/18. Of the six statements one is rated mostly true, four are rated false, and one is rated “Pants on Fire.”
There you have it. According to PolitiFact, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sarah Huckabee Sanders are equally truthful in their dealings with the public. In fact, SHS seems to be slightly more truthful since her 5 falsehood occurred over 20 months, where AOC’s cover a mere 6 months.
If you look closer at the statements fact-checked by PolitiFact, it becomes even more apparent that “The Fix” is in. The most recent statement of SHS’s listed as having been fact-checked is the following:
"Tear gas was used on average once a month during the Obama administration for very similar circumstances."
Of all the lies SHS said behind the podium in the last 6 weeks, PolitiFact chooses to check a statement about the Obama administration’s use of force at the southern border. Just prior to the sentence fact-checked by PolitiFact, SHS claimed: “Law enforcement officials have used appropriate, non-lethal force to protect themselves, and prevent an illegal rush across the border.” The fact that border officials were in danger is, of course, disputed by many if not most witnesses to the situation at the border.
At this point I’m not even sure if PolitiFact is aware of what they’re doing. They start from the a priori assumption that members from both parties lie in approximately equal amounts. Check out Sal Rizzo’s response to AOC highlighting the issue on Twitter this afternoon:
See? Both sides lie. The fact that Trump also complains about fact checking is uses as evidence that AOC’s claims are just as baseless. After all, both sides do it.
Apparently, this isn’t a problem, though. When called on the fact that there was a bit of false equivalency going on, Sal Rizzo had a response:
They’re “not the morality police.” They’re just deciding who gets branded as truthful and who gets called a liar in conversations that determine the moral priorities of the nation.
Listen — I don’t think Dems should get a free pass. But, it’s been obvious for years that one of the nation’s two major political parties has decided that they have no obligation to be truthful in their public statements (hint: it’s the one that says that tax-cuts spur tax revenue, the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, and global warming is a hoax). Until fact checking consistently reports the asymmetrical nature of misleading / untruthful statements made by the GOP (both on and off of Fox News), I’m not really sure that PolitiFact serves any purpose beyond that of your basic horse-race coverage.