Tuesday, August 06, 2013

Politifact still useless after all these years

I stopped reading (and especially linking to) Politifact years ago. After they gave the Dems "Lie of the Year" for something that was absolutely true, I was hoping the very serious important people would do the same. They didn't but maybe today's Politifact idiocy will do the trick. Steve Benen catches us up:
Cantor said that the federal deficit is "growing." Annual federal deficits are not growing right now, and they are not projected to grow through 2015, a point at which the deficit will have shrunk by three-quarters since 2009. By this standard, Cantor is wrong. However, unless policies are changed, deficits are projected to grow again in 2016 and beyond, according to the CBO. On balance, we rate his claim Half True.
In other words, Cantor's bogus claim might be true someday if the planets align perfectly and nothing ever changes in the whole world from this hot minute. As Steve points out, that's sort of like saying: Imagine we're driving down the highway in a car and I step on the accelerator. I then assure you, "Don't worry, the car is slowing down," despite the fact that the car is speeding up. PolitiFact would apparently say my claim is "half true" because sometime soon, the car will probably decelerate.

Or the car might crash into a tree in which case it would certainly stop accelerating. Politifact started out with a good idea and for a while they did a good job. But it's been long since they realized all the biggest lies were coming from one side so they invented false balance so as to look like a neutral observer. Because we all know the truth has a liberal bias.

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