Tag: Lie of the Year

Politifact says the “lie of the year” is that Republicans voted to end Medicare.

But Steve Benen, writing in Washington Monthly, says it’s not a lie since Republicans voted “to privatize the existing system and replace it with something very different — a voucher scheme. It would still be called Medicare, but it wouldn’t be Medicare.”

Paul Krugman writing in the New York Times: “How is this not an end to Medicare? And given all the actual, indisputable lies out there, how on earth could saying that it is be the ‘Lie of the year’? The answer is, of course, obvious: the people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there’s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they’ve bent over backwards to appear ‘balanced’ — and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.”