{"id":184890,"date":"2011-12-21T18:23:00","date_gmt":"2011-12-21T23:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/12\/21\/wanker-of-the-day-6\/"},"modified":"2011-12-21T18:23:00","modified_gmt":"2011-12-21T23:23:00","slug":"wanker-of-the-day-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/12\/21\/wanker-of-the-day-6\/","title":{"rendered":"Wanker of the Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

Actually, the week, and likely the month, and possibly the whole year, is the so-called “fact checkers” at Politifact.<\/p>\n

Basically, they declared that statements that the Paul Ryan “destroy Medicare” plan did in fact destroy Medicare was the “lie of the year<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

I get it: Reality has a well-known liberal bias, but when you are replacing a single payer health insurance system with vouchers that won’t cover private insurance, you are destroying Medicare:<\/p>\n

\n
This is simply indefensible. Claims that are factually true shouldn\u2019t be eligible for a Lie of the Year designation.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unnerving that we have to explain this again, but since PolitiFact appears to be struggling with the relevant details, let\u2019s set the record straight.<\/p>\n

Medicare is a single-payer health care system offering guaranteed benefits to seniors. The House Republican budget plan intended to privatize the existing system and replace it with something very different \u2014 a voucher scheme. It would still be called<\/i> \u201cMedicare,\u201d but it wouldn\u2019t be Medicare.<\/p>\n

It seems foolish to have to parse the meaning of the word \u201cend,\u201d but if there\u2019s a program, and it\u2019s replaced with a different program, proponents brought an end to the original program. That\u2019s what the verb means<\/i>.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(emphasis original<\/i>)<\/p>\n

It’s very simple:  If you eliminate a program, even if you come up with something completely different that you give the same name, you’ve eliminated that program<\/b>.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, if you want to take 10+ years to phase it, you’ve eliminated that program<\/b>.<\/p>\n

I’m in complete agreement with Krugthulhu<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The answer is, of course, obvious: the people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there\u2019s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they\u2019ve bent over backwards to appear \u201cbalanced\u201d \u2014 and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And not only do they go with complete bullsh$%, but they overruled their own polling (even after a ‘Phant congressman attempted to encourage astroturfing, it still came in 3rd<\/sup>) to declare the truth to be a lie, so they doubled down.<\/p>\n

Needless to day, Politifact won’t get links from me.<\/p>\n

There are too many bastions of truthiness out there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Actually, the week, and likely the month, and possibly the whole year, is the so-called “fact checkers” at Politifact. Basically, they declared that statements that the Paul Ryan “destroy Medicare” plan did in fact destroy Medicare was the “lie of the year.” I get it: Reality has a well-known liberal bias, but when you are …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[974,1051,979],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hack-journalism","category-hypocrisy","category-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184890"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184890\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}