Video: Politifact’s 2009 “Lie Of The Year” Deemed True 4 Years Later

“Of all the falsehoods and distortions in the political discourse this year”, Politifact’s Angie Drobnic Holan wrote dramatically on December 18th, 2009 – “one stood out from the rest”: Death panels.

Total lie, you guys!

The claim set political debate afire when it was made in August, raising issues from the role of government in health care to the bounds of acceptable political discussion. In a nod to the way technology has transformed politics, the statement wasn’t made in an interview or a television ad. Sarah Palin posted it on her Facebook page.

Her assertion — that the government would set up boards to determine whether seniors and the disabled were worthy of care — spread through newscasts, talk shows, blogs and town hall meetings. Opponents of health care legislation said it revealed the real goals of the Democratic proposals. Advocates for health reform said it showed the depths to which their opponents would sink. Still others scratched their heads and said, “Death panels? Really ?”

The editors of PolitiFact.com, the fact-checking Web site of the St. Petersburg Times, have chosen it as our inaugural “Lie of the Year.”

PolitiFact readers overwhelmingly supported the decision. Nearly 5,000 voted in a national poll to name the biggest lie, and 61 percent chose “death panels” from a field of eight finalists.

Excellent job, MSM!

President Obama rebutted the claim in a major health care address on Sept. 9: “Some of people’s concerns have grown out of bogus claims spread by those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost. The best example is the claim, made not just by radio and cable talk show hosts, but prominent politicians, that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. Such a charge would be laughable if it weren’t so cynical and irresponsible. It is a lie, plain and simple.”

The phrase has been mentioned in the Congressional Record about 40 times since Palin’s Facebook posting, but virtually all were Democrats citing it as an example of Republican intransigence.

“You know, GOP used to stand for Grand Old Party,” said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., on Nov. 7. “Now it stands for Grandstand, Oppose, and Pretend. They grandstand with phony claims about nonexistent death panels. They oppose any real reform.” The House voted in favor of health care legislation the same day.

Funny. If you read the Politifact article – it doesn’t really debunk the claim. It just cites how Democrats were outrageously outraged, and everybody agreed it was a big ol’, mean ol’ lie.

Palin, for her part was unrepentant. She told the National Review in an interview on Nov. 17, 2009, that she didn’t regret her comments.

“To me, while reading that section of the bill, it became so evident that there would be a panel of bureaucrats who would decide on levels of health care, decide on those who are worthy or not worthy of receiving some government-controlled coverage,” she said. “Since health care would have to be rationed if it were promised to everyone, it would therefore lead to harm for many individuals not able to receive the government care. That leads, of course, to death.”

“The term I used to describe the panel making these decisions should not be taken literally,” said Palin. The phrase is “a lot like when President Reagan used to refer to the Soviet Union as the ‘evil empire.’ He got his point across. He got people thinking and researching what he was talking about. It was quite effective. Same thing with the ‘death panels.’ I would characterize them like that again, in a heartbeat.”

I’ve been waiting for this day. We all knew the truth would come out at some point, and Palin would be vindicated….It’s too late to do anything about it, sure – but some measure of satisfaction can be gleaned from watching Obama’s lapdogs sheepishly admit 4 years later, “aw, you guys were right all the time” – Mark Halperin: Obamacare Contains “Death Panels”:

The Affordable Care Act contains provisions for “death panels,” which decide which critically-ill patients receive care and which won’t, according to Mark Halperin, senior political analyst for Time magazine.

“It’s built into the plan. It’s not like a guess or like a judgment. That’s going to be part of how costs are controlled,” Halperin told “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV.

Halperin is a supporter of the panels which explains why he’s telling the truth about it now, rather than 4 years ago.

Politifact has as track record to be proud of.

2010 PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year: ‘A government takeover of health care’

Which it was….duh.

2012: Politifact’s Lie of the Year Was a Giant Strawman:

In the waning days of the 2012 campaign, the Romney campaign put out an ad in Ohio that made the charge that Chrysler would be building jeeps in China after being bailed out by the government. This caused a massive media backlash, with hyperventilating Democrats calling it a flat out lie. In fact, it was Politifact’s Lie of the Year:

It was a lie told in the critical state of Ohio in the final days of a close campaign — that Jeep was moving its U.S. production to China. It originated with a conservative blogger, who twisted an accurate news story into a falsehood. Then it picked up steam when the Drudge Report ran with it. Even though Jeep’s parent company gave a quick and clear denial, Mitt Romney repeated it and his campaign turned it into a TV ad.

And they stood by the claim, even as the media and the public expressed collective outrage against something so obviously false.

People often say that politicians don’t pay a price for deception, but this time was different: A flood of negative press coverage rained down on the Romney campaign, and he failed to turn the tide in Ohio, the most important state in the presidential election.

Read the entire thing. This particular Politifact post sounds like Media Matters on steroids. But they were right about one thing – there was a flood of negative press coverage that rained down on the Romney campaign – an amazing phenomena we saw again and again throughout the campaign any time Romney made a claim that might draw blood.

Megyn Kelly had Stuart Varney on to talk about the controversy five days before the election. The only thing that was “obviously false” was the “fact checkers’” assertion that the Romney ad claimed Chrysler was “moving US production to China”.

***

As Varney noted in the video, nowhere in the ad did the Romney campaign claim that Chrysler was moving U.S, production to China. That was a massive strawman designed to confuse voters into thinking that Romney was lying about the Precious again. The ad simply stated that Chrysler was sold to Italians who were going to start building jeeps in China which is 100% correct.

Was it an ad I would have wasted time on, if I were running the campaign? No. But the geniuses in the Romney campaign wanted to play tit for tat on Obama’s terms.

Duane Lester at Liberty News points to this big Chrysler announcement, made yesterday in The Detroit News: Chrysler to build Jeeps in China

Linked by Bits Blog, Doug Ross, and Humboldt Republican Women,  thanks!

With the Media’s help, Obama Continues To Perpetrate Fraud On The American People

Andrew McCarthy explains the Regime’s game at NRO: The Scheme behind the Obamacare Fraud:

In 2003, when he was an ambitious Illinois state senator from a hyper-statist district, Obama declared:

I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health-care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. . . . Everybody in, nobody out. A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. That’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately.

That is the Obamacare scheme.

It is a Fabian plan to move an unwilling nation, rooted in free enterprise, into Washington-controlled, fully socialized medicine. As its tentacles spread over time, the scheme (a) pushes all Americans into government markets (a metastasizing blend of Medicare, Medicaid, and “exchanges” run by state and federal agencies); (b) dictates the content of the “private” insurance product; (c) sets the price; (d) micromanages the patient access, business practices, and fees of doctors; and (e) rations medical care. Concurrently, the scheme purposely sows a financing crisis into the system, designed to explode after Leviathan has so enveloped health care, and so decimated the private medical sector, that a British- or Canadian-style “free” system — formerly unthinkable for the United States — becomes the inexorable solution.

Once you grasp that this is the scheme, the imperative to lull the public with lies makes sense. Like all swindles, Obamacare cannot work if its targeted victims figure out the endgame before it is a fait accompli.

The president is a community organizer in the Saul Alinsky tradition. He is trained to adopt the language and co-opt the sensibilities of the masses in order to become politically viable; then, once raw power is acquired, the Alinskyite uses every component of it to thwart opposition in patient but remorseless pursuit of the given “social justice” goal. Consequently, in pursuit of health-care statism, Obama moderated his rhetoric over the years, but not his ideological goals. He stressed pragmatism: a gradual campaign that kept the ultimate prize in sight. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately,” he told his hard-Left base at a 2007 SEIU health-care forum. “There’s going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision a decade out or 15 years or 20 years out.”

There’s that word: transition. It’s the route “change” takes to reach its final destination: “fundamental transformation.” If you’re paying attention, you’ll hear the word transition a lot in Obama’s health-care speeches.

Read it all – Bottom line – unless Republicans get their act together, (to paraphrase McCarthy): if you like your private medical system, you won’t be keeping your private medical system, period.

ObamaCare was always about “transitioning” an unwilling nation into Socialized medicine and it took a lot of fraud and deceit to do that.

Oh, and the fraud and deceit continues with the MSM’s help, to this day. Oh sure, some are sheepishly admitting that, gosh – maybe the media should have vetted some of Obama’s promises a little better, huh? Gosh, who would ever have  guessed that the idea we could  cover more people for less money, and everyone would be able to keep their plans and doctors was utter BS? (Except everyone who could do basic math?)

But now that those lies are no longer operative, we have a new set of lies.

Yesterday, CNBC    was caught peddling this on Twitter: Study: ‘Tiny fraction’ will lose health coverage, pay more.

AoSHQ’s Andy called them out: @CNBC seriously, you should retract this. It’s a paid-for partisan “study” and we’ll mutilate you tomorrow for fluffing it.

I caught wind of this “study”, last week when many media outlets covered the story like it was a legitimate deal.

Families USA is a left Wing health-care lobbying organization that partnered with the White House to run a PR campaign for Obama’s fraudulent health care scheme.. Sister Simone Campbell of the dreadful  “nuns on the bus tour” sits on the board. (These days, Sister Simone Campbell can be found sitting on panels focusing on “poverty, prosperity and economic justice.”)

Well thanks to Sister Simone, there will be far less of the second one due to the “economic justice” of O-Care. Even after being repeatedly promised that they could keep their plans,  millions of people lost their health care plans so the “truly needy” could have theirs. And Sister Simone’s group Families USA will continue to lie about the numbers because lies and deceit in furtherance of “social justice” is not a sin, right Sister? God will understand….

 Families USA recently got $1 million from a liberal foundation to prop ObamaFail up.

Families USA has received a $1 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which it will use to collect and distribute to the media personal stories of those who have benefited from the new health insurance exchange rolled out by the Obama Administration October 1. The announcement is good news for the President, who has been widely criticized for the horrible launch of the online marketplace healthcare.gov.

The old lie was, “if you like you plan you can keep your plan.” Now it has been replaced with, “ok fine,  but only a teeny tiny fraction will lose their plan and pay more.” But what’s going to happen when the Employer Mandate drops, next year, Sister Simone? Is 50 to 100 million people considered “a tiny fraction.”

What about the many, many Americans out there who don’t want Medicaid or government subsidies? What if they were happy with what they had and don’t want to be part of some massive government program? Too bad for  them, huh Sister? You have to crack a few eggs to make that Social Justice Omelette.

Another lie being peddled by the Regime and its media allies:  “the law is helping to bring down overall health spending.”

Via Yuval Levin at The Corner, Charles Blahous of the Mercatus Center and the Hoover Institution  takes on that claim:

Public confidence in the ACA took a beating when it was revealed that millions would lose health coverage that they had been told they could keep. Now the public is being told that the ACA is responsible for government actuaries’ improved health spending projections, when an examination of those projections clearly shows that not to be so. If the supporters of the ACA want to win back public support and confidence, they will need to find a stronger case for the virtues of the law.

Back to CNBC and other “news” outlets uncritically peddling the new lies: Newsflash: We’re on to you. No one believes the Regime’s BS anymore. The American people are not going to allow themselves to be herded like helpless sheep into a  Single Payer, universal, socialized  health care system.

To reporters who continue to help the Regime disseminate lies: Good luck keeping your integrity and self respect as more and more Americans are awakened to the  massive, ongoing fraud and deceit of Obama’s health care plan.

More:

Ace hammers the New York Times for only now discovering that redistribution is central to ObamaCare:

And now the press says, “Sorry, brah. M’ bad.”

Mr. Obama survived that episode and other instances when Republicans deployed old recordings of him using the word “redistribution” as evidence that he was a closet socialist. But Mr. Obama had learned a lesson.

The Times does not say this, but that lesson was “lie about everything.”

***

As with Obama himself, there are only two possible explanations:

1, the press is ignorant and incompetent and simply not up to the job of doing anything more difficult than straight stenography. And what does this say about their alleged status as the cognitive elite?

or,

2, the press is institutionally, conspiratorially dishonest, and chose not only to notreport this for four long years, but even more, chose to actively join in a lie. Because they are fundamentally political actors, and they behave as if they are an extension of Obama’s communications shop, pushing false Narratives and pushing back against honest, accurate criticism.

And what does that say about their status as the nation’s fact-finders?

At some point, we will get them to confront this, and give us a straight answer as to why they lied to the country, more frequently than Obama himself , about Obama and his pet redistributive Trojan Horse.