Paul Krugman’s conscience is shocked by the fact that Politifact, known for their ratings of various statements by politicians from True to Half True to False to Pants-on-Fire, has selected as their “Lie of the Year,” the Democrat’s claim that seniors would have to pay $12,500 more for health care “because Republicans voted to end Medicare.”
Krugman focuses his rebuttal on the simple claim of “ending” Medicare, contending it’s a fair claim to make because the privatization plan would have drastically changed the program. But Politifact addresses that, noting that its concern was with the overreaching nature of the claims:
My own opinion is that Krugman privately thought of Politifact as an ally, and is upset to see his ally attacking friendly forces. But that’s pure speculation on my part. What’s undenaible is that Krugman, along with Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, and The New Republic clearly believe Politifact’s analysis should never have been published. Whether they think this because they believe it to be flawed, or simply strategically unfriendly, is for another day. For now: Is Politifact correct to call the left’s collection of claims about Ryan’s plan a lie? A big lie?
Just because Medicare wouldn’t end immediately doesn’t mean that the Ryan plan wouldn’t mean the end of Medicare. And, just because the new privatized system, that’s designed not to keep up with the cost of medical care, is still called Medicare doesn’t mean it’s the same system.
If Obama proposed changing the Department of Defense so that in 15 years, all personnel would be replaced by school children, and all weapons they ordered had to be made of cardboard, would this be the end of the DoD? It’s not happening immediately, and it’s still called the DoD, right?
If Romney said that Obama’s plan would end the DoD, I wouldn’t call that a lie.
So, I think that the statements that Ryan’s plan would end Medicare are not lies. It would end Medicare as we all define it – a government-paid plan that covers basic medical care for seniors. Ryan’s plan is not designed to cover basic medical care, so it’s not really Medicare.
From a nitpicky angle, I can see how the statement isn’t entirely true. They didn’t vote to cancel the program. Of course they did vote to change the program fundamentally, and Democrats consider changing medicare so that it no longer guarantees coverage for all seniors to be functionally equivalent to ending Medicare.
“because Republicans voted to end Medicare as we know it” would have been more accurate.
However, at the most critical, I think that the original statement could be described as an exaggeration. I don’t see how it possibly stacks up to “lie of the year.”
It seems that most of the comments above do the same thing Krugman did: that is, they focus on the phrase “ending Medicare” and defend its accuracy.
This puzzles me, since both I, and the linked Politifact article, make clear that the “lie” was not the claim that the scheme would end Medicare, but for whom, and when, the scheme would end Medicare. I accept, for the purposes of this argument, the claim that the system would change Medicare so drastically it’s fair to say that it would have ended, but those changes would not have applied to any one currently in Medicare, nor anyone 55 to 65 who would have joined the program in the next 10 years.
So the “ending” would have applied only to those persons younger than 55. Yet the thrust of the attacks insinuated that this was a plan aimed at current Medicare recipients.
Is it that Politfact has no concept of the passage of time? I understood that commercial to mean that, when those changes go through, seniors then will have to, uh, find other ways to pay for medical care. And, my response (first post!) did focus on the timing. If Obama put forth a plan to end the armed services in 15 years, it would be fair to say that Obama is proposing to end the armed services, right?
Is extrapolating into the future specifically laid out by Ryan’s plan that difficult for Politfact?
It’s not a model of probity, but it’s also vauge enough to avoid an outright classification of “lie.” Romney claims that Obama believes that government should create equal outcomes.
What Obama believes is a matter of speculation. I think he’s right – Obama probably does believe that government should create equal outcomes. When government creates equal opportunities and disparate results occur, that’s generally seen by the left as evidence that more government influence is needed.
But I could be wrong. In any event, a vague claim about what Obama believes is not in the same category as specific claims about Medciare that are false.
No, but if you put forth a plan to end the armed services in fifteen years, and I ran an ad against that plan showing current soldiers standing helplessly outside their locked barracks, you would have cause to question my ad’s accuracy.
Yes, very true. However, my belief is that by constant repetition of the actual subject, I’ll force either an embarassed silence or actual discussion of the claim.
Do you really think that Obama believes in equality of outcomes? That’s what Romney said – Obama believes in equality of outcomes. I think there’s a zero chance that Obama believes working towards a perfectly flat society.
Questioning your ad’s accuracy is not equal to “Lie of the year.”
Slice one hair finely, nobody notices. Slice two hairs finely, it is spin. Three hairs, a white lie. I’m just not sure how many split hairs that Politifact had to bunch together to call this the whopper of the year.
Look, everyone with half a brain and a whiff of political instinct knows what’s going on here. Politifact has been in conservative crosshairs this year because most of the lies that they’ve been pointing out have been from Republicans. This, say the critics, is not evidence of half of the leading GOP candidates proving themselves of being completely unsuitable for elected office (does anyone really think that Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, and Rick Santorum (among others) have a good grasp of cold hard facts?). No, say the critics, it’s lib’rul bias!!
Maybe there are some outrageous lies told by liberals that are not getting enough coverage in the press, and Politifact could do a better job of exposing these hypothetical lies that I don’t know of. But calling this Medicare thing, which Politifact and others clearly state is a disagreement of how the point is phrased, as the biggest lie of 2011 is clearly an effort to appease critics from the right. Nothing more, nothing less.
When we call out people for big lies, is it typical to offer a few ways to tweak the statement to make it true? I don’t think so. For example, when Alan Grayson charged the GOP with having a health care plan consisting only of “die quickly,” there’s no way to tweak that statement to make it true. When Michelle Bachmann says… well, anything, there’s no way to make her statements more accurate with a couple different word choices. Big lies are big lies because they are statements beyond repair.
So if the OP is acknowledging the accuracy of Politifact’s suggestions on how to rephrase the “Republicans voted to end Medicare” more truthful, then I think the OP would be implicitly acknowledging that the statement isn’t a big lie at all, just a poorly phrased one.
The ad is misleading, as are most political ads to some degree or another. Does it constitute the “Lie of the Year,” in a year so rich with fragrant bullshit? That’s debatable, to say the least.
As others have said, it looks a lot like a gambit on the part of Politifact to apply a sheen of fairitude and balancity to things.
I think Krugman and other liberal bloggers saw Politifact as an ally in the sense that they were also willing to speak the truth about what’s going on in America rather than kowtow to the incredible political power of the right wing as nearly everyone else does. They are upset because they no longer believe that to be the case. And in fairness to them, it looks like they are correct.
It’s hard to argue that this isn’t a political decision. Politifact was facing some heat for pointing out GOP lies and had they continued using their former method of picking the single biggest lie then a Republican talking point would have “won” for the third year in a row. Instead they bypassed the two most popular choices (both Republican lies) in favor of the third. That just stinks of the type of bias Politifact is supposed to remain above.
As for the statement itself, its veracity depends on what “end” means. Given the ambiguity the way I assess its honesty is to see if the statement is misleading. It clearly was. People on Medicare would naturally fear that GOP pols had voted to end their current benefits when that did not occur. So I have no problem with it being labelled a lie. Or even for it to being called the Lie of the Year if the procedures for determining that award didn’t seem to have been rigged in order to get the result most convenient for Politifact.
I mentioned here awhile back getting a Democratic fundraising letter from “Leader Pelosi” et al, claiming that “Republicans voted to end Medicare”, and recognizing that it was bullshit.
Good for Politifact. If it’s not the biggest lie of 2011, it’s right up there with the leaders.
When Krugman says: