PolitiFact joins media disinformation campaign against McCain

We're not trying to pile on to Sen. John McCain over his misstatement on the link between Iran and al-Qaida.
(PolitiFact)

clipped from www.politifact.com

That claim doesn't pass the sniff test, so I use PolitiFact's own cheesy icon against them.

Most experts do not believe Iran is helping al-Qaida because their respective religious affiliations are at odds with each other. Both sides are Muslim, but the Iranian government is Shiite while al-Qaida is Sunni. And al-Qaida adheres to a fundamentalist form of Sunni Islam that considers Shiites to be apostate. It's not likely the two groups would work together, certainly not "common knowledge."

Looks like we're safe from the mention of any specific experts as well as any reference supporting the claim. This is PolitiFact, after all.

Though it supposedly isn't "likely" according to the anonymous majority of experts that Iran would support the activities of Sunni extremists, it does happen. Eli Lake documented some of the evidence in the New York Sun today.

Here's more, via ABC News (not that the news from ABC is common knowledge or anything):

NATO officials say they have caught Iran red-handed, shipping heavy arms, C4 explosives and advanced roadside bombs to the Taliban for use against NATO forces, in what the officials say is a dramatic escalation of Iran's proxy war against the United States and Great Britain.

But that's not really possible considering how unlikely it is, I suppose.

Then PolitiFact gives us seven more paragraphs explaining the difference between Sunni and Shiite as if that was truly relevant to what McCain stated ("McCain is not the first elected official to get these differences wrong").

The last paragraph is a parting shot at McCain as well as a spin on the facts:

McCain recovered quickly, but we still rate his statement False for saying everyone knows Iran and al-Qaida are working together.

McCain did not say that "everyone knows" or else PolitiFact's ignorance all by itself would disprove his statement. He said it was "common knowledge" and that claim is supported by stories in the mass media.

Well, it's common knowledge and has been reported in the media that, uh, that al Qaida is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran. That's well known.
(Sublovious transcript of McCain's statement)

Interesting that the attempts to call this a McCain gaffe have completely de-emphasized his reference to media reports, isn't it?

McCain probably trusted Lieberman enough to believe that he misspoke, but the facts back up McCain regardless of the anonymous experts (and assuming that PolitiFact could actually find experts willing to back up their claims about what "most experts" say, I would expect that experts with real knowledge of Iranian activities in the region would disagree with their experts).

If PolitiFlack (Maybe PolitiPantsOnFire would be a yet more apt nickname for this outfit) was serious about getting to the facts they would have spent their time giving us some quotation from real experts (representative of the alleged majority) instead of running off on the red herring of the Sunni-Shia distinction.

The fact that they went there suggests that they took a bit of a cue from the Obama campaign.

"Just yesterday, we heard Sen. McCain confuse Sunni and Shia, Iran and Al Qaeda," Obama said.
(LA Times)

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