Back in December, Politifact pretty much crippled its credibility with Progressives when it chose as the biggest lie of the year something that was not a lie at all.
This was presumably done by Politifact, in order to kiss a little elephantine ass so that said elephants would stop calling Politifact a left wing tool. Of course, it didn’t work, and the end result is that they have now limited their usefulness in their efforts to bend way the hell over backwards to appear non-partisan.
Case in point on the non-partisanship thing, is the piece with which Rachel Maddow takes issue:
Maddow said that she has "lost [her] mind more than once recently about how bad Politifact is, and how anybody who values the meaning of the word fact needs to stop citing them as an authority on the subject of facts." On Tuesday's show, Maddow discussed how Politifact looked into Sen. Marco Rubio's recent claim that the "majority of Americans are conservative."
"So, to sum up," Maddow said. "Marco Rubio says, 'the majority of Americans are conservative.' Politifact looks into that and finds that a majority of Amerians do not identify as conservative. And even if you wanted to extrapolate to parties...Republican-leaning instead of conservative...that still doesn't get you to a majority either. So, according to Politifact, Rubio's statement is false." Maddow then turned to Politifact's "truth-o-meter" which concluded that Rubio's statement is "mostly true."
Maddow yelled, "Seriously? Claim A: false. Claim B: false. Overall Politifact rating: mostly true!" Maddow was so angry that she told Politifact to "please leave the building." She asked the organization to leave the lights on as "we will need them to clean up the mess that you have left behind...You are a disaster."
Unlike whoever wrote the piece I quoted from Huffpost (author was unnamed), I think Maddow is spot on, and her indignation is richly deserved by Politifact, who I think should take the word ‘fact’ out of their name.
Barring that, they really need to take a step back from this idea of non-partisanship that they have. As we know, the truth has a liberal bias, and I am not being facetious when I say this.
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