Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

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Nope. Politifact will generally use the most generous possible reading of what a Democrat says, or the least generous reading of what a Republican says, when determining truth or falsehood.

Take a look at these two stories:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/...

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/...

Now, the first story is simply true. Hillary Clinton did attack her husband's mistresses and accusers, and there's a long history of documentation of that. But Politifact labels it "mostly false" because it was never proven to have come directly from her. As if Sidney Blumenthal just took it upon himself to slander Lewinsky as a delusional nymphomaniac.

In the second link, Clinton claims none of her emails were labelled Top Secret. Note the dodge, here. She didn't say, "I didn't send or receive classified information", she said "those emails didn't contain the correct headers". I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest, given that we know she tried desperately to modify the records of the emails once they were discovered, if those headers were simply stripped either before or after the fact. Either way, she is simply not stupid enough to not know what she was doing. But she claims innocence through stupidity, and politifact labels it "mostly true".

What do both of these examples show? That when Hillary walks the line and is careful not to explicitly say anything demonstrably false, while clearly lying in substance, politifact says she's honest. When Trump says something that's substantively true, while not paying attention to specifics, politifact says he's lying.

This is not intellectually honest fact-checking. Letting one candidate play word games and lie while calling out the other for being less careful but telling the truth is not fact-checking, it's shilling.

> Hillary Clinton did attack her husband's mistresses and accusers, and there's a long history of documentation of that

> But Politifact labels it "mostly false" because it was never proven to have come directly from her.

These statements are mutually incompatible. There can't be a long history of documentation for something which is proven.

Start your own fact-checker. Your examples just affirm that Politifact is doing it's job correctly.

If all of your employees are doing one thing, it's safe to assume you've told them to, even if your fingerprints aren't on the proverbial gun. Your comment is exactly what I'm accusing politifact of: you're being as uncharitable as possible to the claim, ignoring common sense and plain language in order to find a reading of it you can say is false.

Thing is, you're not pretending to be impartial and non-partisan. Nor am I. Politifact is. When Politifact's standard of objectivity is indistinguishable from that of a reasonably intelligent random commenter on the Internet, that's a problem.

  There can't be a long history of documentation for something which is proven.

Um, what?

That was a typo. It should be:

> There can't be a long history of documentation for something which is unproven.

> Hillary Clinton did attack her husband's mistresses and accusers, and there's a long history of documentation of that.

Source?

From http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/10/03/us/politics/hillary-bil...

But privately, she embraced the Clinton campaign’s aggressive strategy of counterattack: Women who claimed to have had sexual encounters with Mr. Clinton would become targets of digging and discrediting — tactics that women’s rights advocates frequently denounce.

The campaign hired a private investigator with a bare-knuckles reputation who embarked on a mission, as he put it in a memo, to impugn Ms. Flowers’s “character and veracity until she is destroyed beyond all recognition.”

In a pattern that would later be repeated with other women, the investigator’s staff scoured Arkansas and beyond, collecting disparaging accounts from ex-boyfriends, employers and others who claimed to know Ms. Flowers, accounts that the campaign then disseminated to the news media.

By the time Mr. Clinton finally admitted to “sexual relations” with Ms. Flowers, years later, Clinton aides had used stories collected by the private investigator to brand her as a “bimbo” and a “pathological liar.”

Mrs. Clinton’s level of involvement in that effort, as described in interviews, internal campaign records and archives, is still the subject of debate. By some accounts, she gave the green light and was a motivating force; by others, her support was no more than tacit assent.

----

The Clintonian strategy of attacking, slandering, and blackmailing his accusers is a matter of historical record. And there are many people in the know who said she was a driving force behind it, while others claim she merely acquiesced to it. You can read Hitchens recount the sordid affair here:

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/1999/05/christopher-hitchens-...

Or read No One Left to Lie to for a more in-depth look.

Now you don't have to believe she was the one driving the bus in the smear campaigns against her husband's accusers, even though plenty of people who were there at the time have said she was. But it does show that Politifact is being especially uncharitable to that claim, when they simply could have said it was disputed.

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