Republicans Make False Statements 3X More Than Democrats

"During President Obama's second term." I'd be willing to bet the same would be true of Democrats while a Republican is in office. They are all liars. They make outlandish statements for attention. It's all show-business, unfortunately, and so long as we have people thinking that there is any significant difference between these groups, nothing will ever change.

 

or Politifact is biased...they don't reveal the partisan affiliation of anyone that works there

 

It doesn't seem fair when they have people like Michele Bachmann on their team. Also, the White House has an inherent advantage because there's a whole sphere of things they can lie about and then classify as top-secret on national security grounds.

Actually, I'd like to see them do the split another way: what's the delta between the House, the Senate, and the White House? I bet the House lies more than the other two.

 

I don't see any reason why they should. If their analysis is flawed, it can and should be attacked on its merits.

 

Not much to debate and nothing we didn't already know.

 

What I get from this is that both parties generally have very little integrity.

 

Numbers for Democrats, while not nearly as bad, aren't exactly inspiring confidence.

 

Why not? It looks like they only found 5 false statements by Democrats. The percentages are irrelevant since PolitiFact only looks at questionable statements.

 

hmmmmm

 

Polifact has 5 ratings:
True
Mostly True
Half True
Mostly False
False
Pants on Fire!

Out of 100 statements from this year, 46 were made by Democrats and 54 by Republicans.

From the press release we can see that:
True + Mostly True:
54% Dem, 18% Rep

False + Mostly False+ Pants on Fire:
24% Dem 5, 52% Rep

We can extrapolate the half truths:
22% Dem, 30% Rep

And then further extrapolate:
46% of the time Democrats weren't telling the truth &
82% of the time, Republicans weren't telling the truth

The GOP might be way worse, but if we were to get Santa Claus' opinion on the matter, you can well expect both are getting coal in their stockings.

 

I love that politics has gotten to the point where people will extol "My party lies less then yours!" like that's something to be proud of.

You should practically be ashamed to be involved with either bottom of the barrel, "bought by bribery" political parties.

 

I'm not familiar with the scale, but the story in the OP used "false" or "pants on fire" as their cutoff (i.e., didn't include "mostly false"), so that's what I went with. IMO, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to say "46% percent of the time...", since the denominator is the number of claims investigated by PolitiFact. Presumably, PolitiFact only looks at questionable claims. The press release would be a lot more informative if it used counts instead of percentages.

So over four months, there were 5 "false"/"pants-on-fire" claims by Democrats, 11 if you include "mostly false", and 21 if you include "half true". The comparable numbers for Republicans are 17, 28, and 44.

 

Our political system revolves around the choice between two alternatives. Being dissatisfied with both doesn't preclude comparison.

 

True..it only investigates and rates questionable claims. Ironically, the CMPA article is slightly misleading with the numbers. It would probably warrant a "half true" rating itself by Poltifact.

Some politicians and pundits avoid making them and don't have very many. George W. Bush for example only has 4 statements (getting half True or Mostly True).

Sarah Palin managed 19 out of 54 getting 35%. If she was elected to a seat in Congress she'd actually be beating the curve for the GOP.

The worst I saw was Rush Limbaugh, with only 1 out of 16 statements true. It's listed at 6% but they also round down, it's actually 6.25%). Michelle Bachman fares less than a percent better at 9 out of 59 (6.56%).



Obama has 100s of statements and gets 45%, Joe Biden 41%, John Boehner 35, Mitch McConnell 45%, Nancy Pelosi 18%, and Harry Reid 26%.

Even Sean Hannity manages to get 4 out of 8 true or mostly true. And Republican Saxby Chamblis 5 of 8 (63%) was the best I found of any Republican. The best I saw was for the Dems was Cory Booker (69%).


They don't have any easy way of ranking them all other than to click on each one so that's of only about 20 names I tried. If I get bored enough to write something to scrape the numbers and build a spreadsheet I'll share it, but the question is, how many controversial statements need to be tracked by someone to offer a fair sample size to judge?

 

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all! - Mario Salvo

Spoiler

Sorry, I see 99% of all posts in D&D as mindless programmed automatons, full of media and internet inspired cognitive bias. The other 1% is schtick.

 

Yer too young to be so cynical.

 

It's not a random sample, so there's no number that would be large enough. Increasing the sample size won't get rid of the sample bias caused by PolitiFact's method of selecting statements to investigate.

I think they probably base their selections on how questionable/controversial a statement is and how influential the speaker is. So Limbaugh will only get a look when he says something that's way out there. Meanwhile, an Obama statement wouldn't have to be all that controversial to get their attention, so it's not surprising that he'd have a higher percentage of his statements on PolitiFact turn out to be true.

Four legs good! Two legs baaad!

 

Conservatives playing the "obvious liberal media" card when no real argument can be made?!? Sura falls in faint...

 

On the liberal media basis...

let's said that what's stated in this article is largely correct. That's ~80% of the time Rep lies and ~50% for Dem. Now, let's said that the party members view themselves as mostly being correct and perceptually truthful (I think this is a fair assumption otherwise, why would you stay with a party that is mostly or significantly lying ---- well you could if truthfulness is not as important as your beliefs). So that's to you, your reality, or perception of things. Given that and that the media as a whole is mostly truthful overall (on average over a long period of time), it would make sense why Rep said the media has a liberal bias.