A reader of PolitiFact.com laments:
Just perusing the first three pages of ‘Statements we say are Pants on Fire!’ and of the 60 or so items rated, only four are liberal/progressive/Democrat, remainder are conservative/Republican statements. The disparity is eye-opening.
Gee, wonder why that is. The reader assumes that this is evidence that PolitiFact is horribly biased. The thought that Republicans and right-wing pundits simply lie a lot, and cavalierly, never seems to have occurred to him or her.
This isn’t to say that Democrats and liberals never play hard and fast with the facts; it’s just that when they do, it’s not quite so blatant as what the GOP and right wing have done. You’ll have to look a while before you’ll find a prominent Democratic whopper on the scale and absurdity of, say, “death panels.”
Which is to say, just because both parties are guilty doesn’t mean they’re equally guilty, no matter what the David Broders of the world might like to think.
UPDATE: Bonus flame bait: Since 1939, the number of private-sector jobs has grown roughly three times faster under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents.
Judd
Kevin
Kevin T. Keith
leanleft
tgirsch
I’d like to see context on some of those quotes (Limbaugh’s “You can’t go fishing,” seems like a very odd statement in and of itself and seems like it might be satirical. Disagree with him all you want he’s not unintelligent so that just strikes me as odd).
If you want to hold the GOP accountable for “Chain email” then that’s a standard we’re just going to have to disagree on.
It seems reasonable to expect the GOP to have most of the “Pants on Fire” comments right now. Please note I am NOT excusing it. Seeing as how they have no power all they can do is stoke public anger. If the roles were reversed I would expect the lie-o-meter to be about the same in the other direction. So yes, T, both parties are guilty but to tar the GOP based of just this year is too narrow.
Counter flame bait: If what you say about jobs is true then that’s because the first thing the GOP does when assuming power is clean up the mess the Democrats left them then as soon as it’s fixed the Democrats come back just in time to take the credit.
Regarding your counter-flame-bait, I’ve generally heard the same thing about the economy, only in reverse. The GOP messes things up, and a (usually one-term) Democratic president comes in and starts doing the hard and often unpopular work of cleaning up the mess, gets booted just as things get better, and the Republican takes the credit.
Meanwhile, I don’t hold the GOP responsible for the chain e-mails; and agreed that most of those are going to be anti-Democrat right now just because the Democrats are in power. Even when one disregards the chain e-mails, however, prominent conservative voices make a lot more pants-on-fire type statements, and this seems to be the case whether they’re in power or not. When you get more toward the middle of the spectrum (half-true, barely true), it evens out a lot more.
This is a commentary not so much on whether the two parties engage in lies and spin, but what kind of lies and spin that they engage in. When Democrats do it, they seem to at least make a little bit of effort at plausibility.
Finally, I’m not tarring the GOP on the basis of just this year. I’m going back over the better part of the last decade (though this site only goes back 2 or 3 years or so).
[Cue digglahhh coming in and talking about small sample sizes, non-representative samples, etc.]