Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is kinda breaking their system. She’s clearly not a habitual liar, she just has no idea what she’s talking about most of the time.
Are you seriously just looking for some to post “But Trump?”.
Because that would lame.
I agree that 3 out of the 4 quotes in your link are untrue. Thanks for pointing it out!
No, just furthering a rather old argument we’ve had here. We all know Trump’s a liar, but some people actually tried to portray Clinton as honest because she had a pretty good Politifact profile. But Politifact better measures how careful a politician is, or how good their staff is, or how smart the politician is. AOC is obviously a newbie, with no staff yet and she’s young and exuberant. So talking out of her ass is a thing with her. But I’d certainly trust her to be honest with me more than I would Clinton, Trump, Obama, or Romney.
I’m not convinced that absolute honesty is a desired trait in a President. A lot of good Presidents equivocated when they felt the truth wasn’t going to work.
But carefulness, organization, and intelligence are definitely traits a President needs. I condemn Trump not so much for lying as I do for how bad he is at it. When somebody like Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt or Richard Nixon or Bill Clinton lied, they made sure it was a well-crafted lie that suited whatever purpose they were trying to achieve. Trump lies like a four year old that just broke a lamp.
I’m not following the point trying to be made.
She says a lot of wrong things. This is pointed out. What’s not working here?
Their label for clearly false statements is a reference to lying, Pants on Fire. There’s a difference between inaccuracy and actively trying to deceive that matters IMO. That difference seems to have been lost in a lot of political discussion IME. I believe painting every error in terms of something that’s broadly considered to be immoral, lying, has a corrosive effect on our politics and reinforces hyper-partisanship.
AOC’s struggling with making sure her claims are factual. I wouldn’t, however, paint her as immoral and deceitful. It’s an important difference for me.
What exactly are you saying Politfact is wrong about? And what sources do you have to verify that? If nothing, then what is your complaint?
And what does a past candidate for president have to do with it? Are you alleging the site was wrong about her?
Their idea of fact is getting really loose. I especially like this one where they admit that if abortion counted as a “killer” of black Americans it would be the leading cause of death as claimed because the top cause, heart disease, kills 75,249 people and 259,336 African American babies are aborted annually, but considering they don’t think abortion counts as a cause of death, the guy who made the claim is mostly lying.
Your argument is a valid one if you see politics as strictly about results. But I see the process of democracy as extremely important and it’s impossible for the public to make choices if politicians just lie to them.
They aren’t wrong about much, but people sometimes misuses their scorecards, thinking it measures relative honesty. It’s actually a better barometer for how informed a politician is. Which is why someone like Clinton or Obama scores so well, but an AOC does not. I’m actually surprised they’ve only analyzed four statements. I guess some others, like “you won’t need to pay for burial if we have health care” is just too silly to even fact check.
I have zero idea how the link back up any of the OP’s assertions - little help?
ETA: I agree that people assuming dishonesty of those on the other side is corrosive, but this website isn’t painting “every error” as a lie. Most statements are evaluated on the scale of true/false, which has no connotations of dishonesty. The most egregious falsehoods are labeled “pants on fire” which I think in this context should be clearly read as a little clever snipe, or a humorous exaggeration. If someone is reading “pants on fire” to be a literal accusation of a lie, then I think they should just not be so uptight.
i"m curious about this
“Just last year we gave the military a $700 billion budget increase, which they didn’t even ask for.”
“The military” is a nebulous concept. Doesn’t the military proposal already include on-going costs of low-value bases whichCongresscritters insist on? … And the spending bill did include several $billions of new aircraft over what the Pentagon asked for.
Of course conflating a “$700 billion budget” with a “$700 billion budget increase” was egregious — I hope it was just a slip of the tongue!
False is called false, lies are called lies. Is it Politifact’s fault some people are so shallow-thinking as to confuse false with lie? I’m not sure how much more clearly they could label things, at some point responsibility for being illiterate falls on the knucklehead. Maybe go with “Wrong” rather than “False”?
I pointed out how bad of a job they do in a thread where someone cited their article about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s comment on two jobs and people working 60, 70, 80 hours a week. The article claims that she’s “pants on fire” about it, but the article fails to back that up. Notably, when the article goes to address the “60, 70, 80 hours” claim, it just plain drops the “60” part and only discusses people working 70-80 hours per week. It then goes on to make the claim that the only way to work 70-80 hours per week is to have two full time jobs, which is just absurd as one can work 70-80 hours at a single job, or juggle two ‘as close to full-time as we can get and legally not provide benefits’ part-time jobs. That’s completely damning for the politifacts article; you can’t support a claim that someone is lying if you have to ignore 1/3 of their claim to do it, and you can’t support a claim that someone is lying by using blatantly untrue declarations as ‘facts’ that they didn’t get right. The numbers used also completely ignore the fact that employers (especially retail and restaurant employers) often outright lie about how many hours employees work; I don’t know anyone who’s worked multiple retail/restaurant jobs who hasn’t encountered at least one employer that violated labor laws by asking people to clock out before they leave, wait to clock in after they arrive, or work hours off the clock, and there’s no obligation to report long hours required for salaried employees.
From the conversation here, it appears this is typical of their analysis - they ignore parts of a statement, make up conditions that simply aren’t true, and ignore known and obvious problems with statistics that they use.
Ok, I see that. But that doesn’t prove or give evidence to your title: Further proof that Politifact doesn’t actually measure honesty.
Politifact doesn’t claim to measure “honesty” of people. It measures certain quoted or controversial statements for their honesty.
Of course, if you compare one politicians overall statement “honesty” vs another, you can get a* idea *of their veracity. It’s true that Politicos that speak off the cuff more often will get more “pants on fire” that those who have all their statements carefully vetted.
She made several statements: "“Unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs. Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their family.”
The first is blatantly untrue.
The next is false on two counts, but you ignored the second. Yes, they pointed out that very few people hold two FT jobs.
But they also pointed out that: "The average number of hours worked in the private sector has hugged tightly to about 34.5 hours a week since 2006,…"
So, that would prove that very few Americans “are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week”
and most importantly “In any case, the BLS does not use either of those factors in determining the official unemployment rate.”
So even if she was correct on all counts (which she isn’t) her statement would still be false.
I don’t believe that is accurate at all. When Mattis was sworn in as Secretary of Defense soon after inauguration, he very quickly forwarded a list of about $30 billion in stuff that he wanted that wasn’t in the prior budget plans. Then, he advocated for a budget deal to increased defense spending very substantially over two years. There’s just no universe in which the head of the Department of Defense didn’t advocate for more money. It’s a textbook case of being plain wrong.
But what you and other politifacts fans seem to miss is that they LIED in multiple ways while failing to show that her claim was false. As I pointed out, and you ignored, they refused to address the ‘60’ part of the claim and simply ignored it, acting like she claimed 70-80 when she actually claimed 60-80 is simply dishonest. They then made the false claim that the only way to work 70-80 hours is to hold two full time jobs, and cited a figure about the low number of people who hold two full-time jobs to show that few people could possibly be working 70-80 hours.
Again, the problem is that their attempt to show her claim was false failed to address the actual claim she made (ignoring the 60 hours part) and had them making MULTIPLE FALSE CLAIMS. After looking at this article and criticisms of a few others, I won’t trust anything the site has to say.