PolitiFact hews to the ridiculous

For some reason, the professionals at PolitiFact (PolitiHack?) seem to think it significant that John McCain compared the Jewish Purim celebration with Halloween. Both involve candy and costumes, but PolitiFact rates McCain "False" with their "Truth-O-Meter."

This on the heels of their diaphanously thin claim that McCain was wrong that Iran trains al Qaida terrorists who end up in Iraq.

I wonder what news accounts the PolitiFact folks relied on. No doubt they have wire services to peruse, but Redlasso came up empty for me when I tried to find a video version that would supply the context.

Here's the version from MSNBC's "Firstread":

McCain made the incorrect statement during a press conference with Defense Minister Ehud Barak after touring the Israeli city of Sderot to view buildings damaged by Hamas rocket fire. McCain was discussing the numerous rock attacks on the city. "Nine hundred rocket attacks in less than three months, an average of one every one to two hours. Obviously this puts an enormous and hard to understand strain on the people here, especially the children. As they celebrate their version of Halloween here, they are somewhere close to a 15-second warning, which is the amount of time they have from the time the rocket is launched to get to safety. That's not a way for people to live obviously."

How is it flatly "false" that a holiday of particular interest to kids that also involves costumes and candy fails to have an analog in Halloween? Sure beats me, but it's as clear as mountain spring water to the media professionals at PolitiFact.

PolitiFact also displayed its Sherlock Holmes-ish attention to detail by noting that Joe Lieberman once again bailed out McCain on yet another gaffe during his overseas trip. In the last paragraph (sixteenth out of 16) they do get around to acknowledging that McCain apparently relied on Lieberman for the comparison in the first place, but you get the point. That McCain's a liar.



Again, if PolitiFact were serious they would merely have focused on any degree to which McCain's statement was offensive to those in attendance. The news reports offer some very subtle hints that was the case (that Lieberman found it necessary to explain the comparison is one). But even so, the candy/kids/costumes similarities make McCain's statement at least somewhat true.

Yet PolitiFact has the needle buried at "False"--one notch above "Pants-on-fire."

This was not a serious fact to check, and PolitiFact marks itself yet again as non-serious in the political fact-checking game. The failure to even address Barack Obama's false charge that McCain confused Sunni and Shiite (beyond PolitiFact's chorus in separately supporting the false charge against McCain) goes yet further in showing that PolitiFact is a sham. PolitiFact is little better than the fabulously biased Media Matters.

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