This years Feckless Pander of the Year FAIL award goes to Politifact.com for their absurd conclusion that although it's true that the GOP/Paul Ryan plan to eventually convert Medicare to a privatized voucher system would essentially end Medicare "as we know it" - it is simply not true that a senior citizen dressed up like a fireman will appear at your front door to perform a striptease routine for your teenage daughter and her friends.
Think Progress
PolitiFact has just announced its finalists for 2011′s Lie of the Year. Oddly, the year’s most significant policy claim — the Democrats' charge that the Paul Ryan budget will end Medicare — made the list, even though it’s 100 percent true!
Here is why: Ryan’s plan ends traditional fee-for-service program and forces seniors to ultimately enroll in private coverage.
Under his proposal, beginning in 2022, people turning 65 will receive a pre-determined “premium support” payment to purchase private coverage. The insurers will offer a basic package of benefits, but traditional Medicare — the program that President Lyndon Johnson enacted in 1965 — will literally stop enrolling new beneficiaries.
Summary: Politifact.com decides to tether their credibility to a flat tire and fling the whole business onto a pyre of burning pants. Where they'll billow black gaseous smoke and stink up the atmosphere for at least a year. Or maybe forever... Goodbye Cruel World:
Politifact, R.I.P
This is really awful. Politifact, which is supposed to police false claims in politics, has announced its Lie of the Year — and it’s a statement that happens to be true, the claim that Republicans have voted to end Medicare.
[...]
The answer is, of course, obvious: the people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there’s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they’ve bent over backwards to appear “balanced” — and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.
Way to go, guys.
MEANWHILE THE REAL LIE OF THE YEAR award goes to the claim that:
The stimulus created "zero jobs." ~ National Republican Senatorial Committee, Thursday, October 13th, 2011.
[edit/updated below - Dec 22, 2011]
And you don't need a smuggly self-satisfied muck-it-up from St. Petersburg, Florida to tell you that.
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3 comments:
in trying NOT to be biased. they showed theselves to BE biased. pants on fire for bachman's too easy.
"As we know it" needed as a friggin' disclaimer? I don't remember "unplugging Grammaw as we know her".
At least in our area, they did a good job of splitting hairs on statements rather than delving in to the implied arguments behind them. Gave plenty of Republicans cover to seem 50/50.
i guess privatizing it isn't KILLINg medicare w/ cost less. and death panels.
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