The Left is apoplectic over this year’s PolitiFact Lie of the Year. Given that PolitiFact came under so much fire from the right this year, conservatives should be cautious, even if optimistic. A year-end gift, or a big show of balancing of the scale, will not undo any damage PolitiFact might do during the course of any year. In fact, leftists may be upset precisely because they are more generally accustomed to PolitiFact having their backs.

PolitiFact debunked the Medicare charge in nine separate fact-checks rated False or Pants on Fire, most often in attacks leveled against Republican House members.

Now, PolitiFact has chosen the Democrats’ claim as the 2011 Lie of the Year.

It’s the third year in a row that a health care claim has won the dubious honor. In 2009, the winner was the Republicans’ charge that the Democrats’ health care plan included “death panels.” In 2010, it was that the plan was a “government takeover of health care.”

Criticisms from the right can easily be found via the PolitiFact Wiki. Certainly, now they can claim to have received harsh criticism from both sides in 2011–they must be doing something right, right?

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Simon Rosenberg, of the Progressive “think tank”, NDN, went on Fox to parrot Democrat talking points regarding the budget and plans to reform Medicare. Unfortunately for Simon, the other guest on the show, radio host Ben Ferguson, wasn’t having any of it. Watch the money clip.

It seems Rosenberg is more comfortable at places like MSNBC where the host would attack the conservative, in this case Ferguson, instead of trying to calmly moderate the debate like the Fox host did.

Rosenberg was fearmongering. He was also lying. The only budget proposal the President has presented to Congress completely ignored the Simpson / Bowles Commission Rosenberg referenced in the video. That budget proposal was also soundly rejected by a vote of 0-97 in the Senate. Ferguson was right to point out that Democrats have decided to forgo offering any solution to the looming debt and deficit crisis and have opted to just attack – with fearmongering and lies – the Republicans who are offering realistic solutions.

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When you tell a liberal the truth they recoil in disbelief.  Seriously.

Just watch Kirsten Powers and her disbelief  in this interview when the bomb is dropped about 6:00 in.  She’s so flustered when she finds out the truth that President Bush vetoed the 2008 bill with the end-of-life provision in it and it was the Democrat Congress that overrode the veto and forced it into law.

Here’s the transcript:

SCHLAPP: And government itself, let me tell you, the language here right, the language is different. They made the language worse, instead of doing this once every five years, now the Obama administration is allowing this to happen every year and actually reimbursing doctors to do it every year. So, that’s quite a slight of hand. And doesn’t government — aren’t they a little conflicted here? They have to find this huge health care savings for seniors at the same time they’ve become the counselors to seniors in their end of care decisions?

POWERS: Where was your outrage in 2008 when the Bush administration said that Medicare would reimburse end of life counseling?

SCHLAPP: It was a veto that was overridden by the Democrats. So, I give President Bush credit for vetoing that bill.

POWERS: No, it was a 2008 law. I mean, I don’t know what are talking about.

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Number three on our list almost violates the criteria that I set up in the first piece I wrote for this series. I said then that denizens of the Old Media that are too much a “cartoon of journalism” would not be included on my list. Yet despite my dismissal of such Old Media clowns, in the number three slot on the list you’ll find Paul Krugman of The New York Times.

Given today’s revelations about the JournoList, we now know Krugman either participated in a media conspiracy to get Obama elected or at least witnessed it first hand and did nothing to stop it.  Consider this fact merely the latest insight into a man who’s done more consistently left-biased journalism than nearly anyone in America.

Krugman is indeed quite a cartoon of modern liberalism. He is hidebound and far from a new or even a very free thinker. But he makes the list simply because he is not only a Nobel Prize winner but is one of the leading media figures in America today. So, despite that he is not an original thinker and is steeped in liberal orthodoxy, his prominence argues for his inclusion here.

And besides that he is a true liberal loon.

Krugman’s January 17 piece is a perfect example of the nonsense that he tries to pass off as political analysis. In his piece headlined “What Didn’t Happen,” Krugman seriously tried to claim that one of Barack Obama’s biggest failings was that he doesn’t blame Bush enough for his own failings.

Mr. Obama didn’t… shelter himself from criticism with a narrative that placed the blame on previous administrations.

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