President Trump Wins Coveted WaPo "True But False" Fact Check Rating

The whole fact checking binge the media has been on for the last few years is a joke. The typical way it works is that you get some highly partisan people, perhaps RawStory alumni (I’m not making that up) or maybe you create and affirmative action program for imbeciles and put all those hired in your fact checking program (I suspect this is the Washington Post business model), and then you have them “fact check” politicians. Generally speaking, this cuts exactly one way. Anything a Republican or GOP politician says that cuts against the progressive agenda is false. There is virtually nothing that a Democrat says that will be called out as false in a way which will hurt them.

For instance, PolitiFact rated Obama’s “if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor” as 100% True when Obama first said it. It was only years later that they rated it lie of the year. (Visit my post on this.)

The other trick they use is to take an opinion expressed by a GOP politician or pundit and disagree with the opinion and use that to rate the opinion false. They’ve done this with Erik Erickson and they’ve done it with Ted Cruz. (Visit this post.)

Some of the best ones is where the fact checkers are faced with incontrovertible facts and they rate the claim false because they don’t like the implications:

PolitiFact’s idiot younger sibling, PunditFact, rated Sean Davis’s (The Federalist) claim that the Clinton Foundation spend 15% of its fundraising on actual programs as “mostly false” after they admitted the numbers were correct.

The claim contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, so we rate it Mostly False.

The Washington Post awarded a “three Pinocchio” rating to a statement that Obama had voted against a proposed Illinois law that would have prevented babies that survived abortion from being left to die despite the actual roll call vote showing he did exactly that.

But the granddaddy of all them all is the Washington Post’s fact checking operation run by Glenn Kessler. This is the guy who gave the RNC the famous “True but False” rating.

The Pinocchio Test
We cannot fault the RNC’s math, as the numbers add up. But at this point this figure doesn’t mean very much. It may simply a function of a coincidence of timing — a brief blip that could have little to do with “Obama’s job market.”

If trends hold up over the next few months, then the RNC might have a better case. But at this point we will give this statistic our rarely used label:

TRUE BUT FALSE

Last night in President Trump’s speech he said:

In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes, and 4,000 violent killings.

This is how the Washington Post rates it: The number is right but misleading.

This epitomizes what is wrong with the whole bizarre fact checking fetish. The media obviously had a goal, basically announced before the President spoke, to try to fact check his speech and declare virtually everything he said to be untrue.

I don’t find anything at all misleading about calling people with criminal records just that. When as many as half the total number of persons with US criminal records are violent felons, you can’t sugar coat the magnitude of the problem.

The fact that quoting an actual fact can be called misleading tells you all you need to know about the degree to which American media have become nothing more than a free and not terribly bright adjunct to the Democrat party. For this performance, the Washington Post gets the coveted Four-Heady.