Kamala Harris consented to a puffball panel discussion with the National Association of Black Journalists on Sept. 17, and it was announced that PolitiFact would engage in live “fact-checking.” Its Twitter feed then displayed 14 checks on Harris’ answers. The first one was labeled “False,” and all the rest of them were “True,” “Accurate,” or basically okey-dokey.
On Sept. 11, PolitiFact hit a new milestone in leftist aggression. Former President Donald Trump was thumped with a “Pants on Fire” tag for the 200th time with “they’re eating the pets” in Springfield, Ohio. He’s been tagged with flaming pants 12 times since June 1.
Harris, by contrast, has zero. She was first elected statewide in California in 2010. Your two candidates this year, not exactly “neck-and-neck” at 200 to nothing.
Now compare this to national politicians since PolitiFact came on the scene in 2007. Joe Biden has seven “Pants On Fire” ratings, and only one as president. Barack Obama has nine, Hillary Clinton has nine, Bill Clinton has three, and Bernie Sanders has a perfect zero like Harris.
Even Republicans don’t have anything like Trump’s 200. George W. Bush has zero, John McCain had eight, Ted Cruz has 11, Newt Gingrich has 12, and surprisingly, Mitt Romney has 19—and 18 of those came in 2011 and 2012, when he challenged Obama for the White House. Their weirdest Romney “Pants on Fire” came when he said, “We’re only inches away from no longer being a free economy.” You can argue we didn’t have a free market back under Obama in 2012.
Bryan White at PolitiFactBias.com says this harsh flaming rating “counts as substantially if not wholly subjective.” That’s not to say that some lies aren’t whoppers. It’s when they emotionally hate something that’s not as bad as they claim it is.
In April, White singled out a “Pants on Fire” for Trump claiming he “did much better” in the Wisconsin election in 2020 than 2016, and “after the wrongdoing was found, people said, ‘Well, he actually did win.'” The second half is false: He narrowly lost Wisconsin.
But the first half is mathematically true: Trump’s vote count in 2020 was 1,610,184 in Wisconsin, and it was 1,405,284 votes in the state in 2016. So he had more votes. He “did better.” Except that he won the state in 2016, and lost it in 2020. This sounds like a “Half True,” not a “Pants on Fire.”
On Sept. 4, Trump was rated as “Pants on Fire” for calling Harris a “communist.” It’s like CNN host Kasie Hunt’s noting during the Democrat convention, “She doesn’t identify as a communist.”
Now flip that to the other party. Many Democrats and leftists have called Trump a “fascist.” Search PolitiFact for a harsh rating on that, and you won’t find it. What you will find is a “Half True” rating on Madeline Albright comparing Trump’s “drain the swamp” rhetoric to fascist Benito Mussolini.
When Biden compared Republicans to Jim Crow segregationists over their voting-integrity legislation, PolitiFact argued the subject was too complicated for a rating. They claimed: “Some historians say Biden’s rhetorical point was justified as a way of highlighting the dangers of backsliding from hard-won voting rights.”
These dramatic double standards on “facts” underlines why so many voters don’t trust “fact-checkers.” Trump has 1,051 fact checks, and 805 of them are “Mostly False” or worse—76.6% wrong. Bernie Sanders has 176 fact checks, and 44 were on the false side — 25%. Bernie can call Trump a “fascist” and he’s all good.
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