The Joe Buck Disgusting Act of the Week: Politifact

The Joe Buck Disgusting Act of the Week is awarded to whatever event/person best deserves Joe Buck's unnecessary and over the top outrage after a 2004 Randy Moss' touchdown celebration.

If you read this blog, you're aware that the conservative game plan for the last __ years involves constantly lying about everything and depending on the media to not call them out, and report the story in a he said she said, you decide fashion. So when CNN and other news organizations started citing this service called Politifact I thought it was hilarious they treated it as this crazy new technology, rather than "doing their jobs".

The inherent problem with Politifact was going to be as follows: Conservatives lie constantly about fucking everything. If a fact checking service was going to do it's job, it was going to call out conservatives a lot more than it would with anyone else... opening themselves up to the charge of liberal bias. And since the charge of liberal bias is apparently so strong that shielding yourself from this label is actually more important than doing your job for most media organizations, this was always going to be an issue.

So while it was nice that people were pretending to care about accuracy... there was always this looming problem when Politifact would have to decide between doing their jobs or getting to sit at the cool kids table with all the other worthless news organizations.

And now, perfectly in line with everything wrong with our media, we get this logic: (TPM)

Here’s a long, sad story about how Democrats’ basically true claim that House Republicans voted to end Medicare ended up with PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year award.

Back in April, House Republicans passed a budget that included a plan to phase out Medicare over several years and build in its place a subsidized, private insurance marketplace for seniors.
Democrats called this a vote to “end Medicare.”

You can quibble. It wasn’t a vote to end Medicare — BLAM! — all at once. But under the GOP plan, within a couple decades, the current health retirement program for old people would be gone and in its place would be an entirely different one. It would just, by political design, have the same name: Medicare.
Ignoring policy in favor of process, and with an eye toward political balance, PolitiFact rated this basically true Democratic claim “Pants on Fire.”

Liberals, economists, health policy experts, and yours truly objected strongly to PolitiFact’s conclusion. But instead of rethinking their conclusion, the PolitiFact turned the opprobrium into a badge of honor: The claim itself became a candidate for PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year” contest; Paul Ryan — the House GOP budget chairman who authored the plan — engaged in a modest ballot stuffing campaign; and the Democrats’ true “lie” came in third place, just behind the GOP claim that the stimulus created zero jobs, and Sen. Jon Kyl’s claim that abortion services are “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.”

In a way I'm actually glad this happened, because sometimes it takes an example this stupid to bring the amount of lying to the forefront. Of course that won't be what happens, the conclusion will be that Paul Ryan is a reasonable man who simply wants to fix medicare, and shame on those crazy hippies for saying otherwise.

The fact free discourse lives on, now with it's very own "fact checking institutions" to help ensure that no one has the slightest clue about what's going on.