It might shock you to learn, via Alex Adrianson of the Heritage Foundation’s “Insider Online” blog, that the left-leaning Politifact project at the Tampa Tribune pulls plenty of punches when it comes to President Obama’s statements.
Between 2008 and 2012, Politifact, the so-called fact-checking project at the Tampa Bay Tribune, ran six columns rating the truthfulness of claims regarding President Barack Obama’s various statements that under Obamacare people could keep their health insurance if they like it. That’s according to a tally by Sean Higgins at the Washington Examiner.
In none of those columns did Politifact hold the President accountable for telling a lie. The best Politifact could do was rate the President’s claim “half true.” It wasn’t totally false, Politifact reasoned, since “one of the points of reform is to change the way health care works right now.” Politifact might as well have said: “Anybody who looks into it must realize the claim can’t be true, so it’s not really a lie to say it.”
By the way, that reasoning, from an August 2009 column, perfectly tracks the liberal talking points now. Jared Bernstein, for example, defends the President by writing: “[A]s clearly stated at the time, if such a plan were to significantly change in ways that are inconsistent with consumer protections under the ACA, it would lose its grandfathered status. Like I said, this has been known since the law was written.” [On the Economy, October 29]
Higgins also observes that Politifact regularly engages in “goal-post moving”: While it purports to evaluate the truthfulness of statements, it’s really assessing the merits of ObamaCare from a liberal perspective.
