Politi-Fact’s “Lie of the Year” Makes it Part of Obama-Nation

by Lone Shark

Towards the end of that 1990′s movie Enemy of the State, Robert Dean (played by Will Smith) observed that it’s vital for us to “monitor the monitors” of national security, which prompted his wife reply to him, “who’s going monitor the monitors of the monitors?”  In that same holiday spirit, we ask this- who’s fact checking the “fact” checkers?  Case in point is Politi-Fact, which is a project of Florida’s own St. Petersburg Times.  Politi-Fact makes the rather highfalutin claim that its reporters and editors “Sort out the truth in Politics” as it employs its “Truth-O-Meter” to “separate fact from fiction” by analyzing the various individual claims made by politicos of all stripes to assesses their veracity (some might say “truth-iness”).

Politi-Fact, along with the Annenberg Center’s Fact-Check.org, posit themselves as dispassionate and unbiased arbiters of truth in the political universe.  Having kept tabs on Politi-Fact for quite sometime now, it has a discernible M.O. that is clearly biased towards their contributors’ liberal perspective.  Politi-Fact far too often sets up straw men arguments to knock down so that it can enhance its “unbiased” reputation by criticizing politicos on both sides of the aisle.  Another technique that Politi-Fact uses is that it will hyper-analyze a very small, nearly irrelevant point of contention while ignoring or omitting the larger and oftentimes much more important point that it is subordinate to, kind of like that annoying kid in high school whose pedantic nonsense made you want to strangle him before he’d run away to annoy someone else, but we digress.

Anywho, Politi-Fact has judged the biggest political lie of the year to be those who claimed that Obamacare was “A Government Takeover of Healthcare”. Funny, but where were these guys when President Obama bear-hugged Charlie Crist in Fort Myers and made all sorts of ludicrous promises about the wonders of the so-called “Stimulus Plan”–right in Politi-Fact’s proverbial backyard?

Apparently, Politi-Fact feels that it can call attention to this “Lie of the Year” with a straight face simply because President Obama didn’t channel his inner-Hugo Chavez by ordering the U.S. Military to commandeer hospitals; nor did he channel his inner-Castro by treating doctors as bartering chips that could be exported out of the country to other rogue regimes on a whim.

The mountain of deceptive rhetoric that President Barack Hussein Obama employs–the yawning gap between his rhetoric and his actions on just about every issue- means that there are so many lies just crying to be exposed by “fact checking” outlets.  Instead, Politi-Fact has become laughably fictitious by making such an absurdly superficial judgment amidst the sea of deception that surrounds our national political discourse, thanks in no small part to President Obama.

One could literally spend days disassembling the coercive provisions of ObamaCare, and yet Politi-Fact apparently didn’t bother to engage in the least bit of intellectual honesty to investigate the truth for the benefit of its readers.  To restate the record for our friends at Politi-Fact- from the get-go, President Obama attempted to characterize his “reform” as a mainstream attempt to reform the nation’s private health-insurance system, but in the reality that everyone else lives in but Politi-Fact, it was the largest expansion of government power over the private sector economy in our nation’s history.

Any way you slice it, ObamaCare is an incremental government takeover of our health care system that casts its ugly glare into every last crevice of our health care system.  From the Department of Health and Human Services’ pre-emptive attacks against private insurers to delegitimize their concerns about the law; to its addition of new bureaucracies and thousands of new employees that are needed to enforce the law; to its IRS-enforced mandates that require all Americans to carry health insurance, to its imposition of price controls via reimbursement schedules that directly impact doctors and health care providers, the damage that ObamaCare is doing to the health care industry is enormous even before it is even fully implemented.

ObamaCare is no doubt an incremental government takeover of the health care system.  It is completely lost on the wizards of smart at Politi-Fact that there are lots of ways to control and coerce someone or something without putting a literal gun to someone’s head.  It was no less an authority than Chief Justice John Marshall who reminded us in the Supreme Court decision McCulloch v. Maryland. that “the power to tax is the power to destroy” – which is exactly what ObamaCare is doing to private insurance carriers.

Politi-Fact should stop operating behind the veneer of a “fact-checking” organization and drop any claim that it is an impartial outlet in dogged pursuit of the truth, wherever it may lead them.  Better yet, we recommend that Politi-Fact rename itself “The Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times” for the benefit of its readers- you could print that in your “Corrections” section, if you prefer.

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