Grading PolitiFact: Obama and the Venezuelan threat (Updated)

It is unbecoming for a fact check operation to do more floundering than Mrs. Paul's and Gorton's combined. But such is the case with PolitiFact, jointly staffed by The St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly (see Update, below).

The latest journalistic snafu involved President Obama's actions at the Summit of the Americas.

Fact-checking the Fact checkers

The issue:

During a press conference, Barack Obama was asked about his chummy treatment of U.S. critic and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Obama responded that Venezuela's military budget was considerably smaller than that of the U.S. and that he didn't think his behavior with Chavez jeopardized U.S. interests.

The statement, with abundant context along with some added bold emphasis:

Q During the campaign you were criticized by some within your own party for perhaps not being able to be tough on foreign policy matters. Now you've had this friendly interaction with Mr. Chavez. Are you concerned at all about how this might be perceived back in the U.S. as perhaps being soft? Already one senator is calling this friendly interaction irresponsible. And as a quick follow-up, if I may, when you got the book from Mr. Chavez, what did you really think? (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: I think it was a nice gesture to give me a book; I'm a reader. And you're right, we had this debate throughout the campaign, and the whole notion was, is that somehow if we showed courtesy or opened up dialogue with governments that had previously been hostile to us, that that somehow would be a sign of weakness. The American people didn't buy it. And there's a good reason the American people didn't buy it -- because it doesn't make sense.

You take a country like Venezuela -- I have great differences with Hugo Chavez on matters of economic policy and matters of foreign policy. His rhetoric directed at the United States has been inflammatory. There have been instances in which we've seen Venezuela interfere with some of the -- some of the countries that surround Venezuela in ways that I think are a source of concern.

On the other hand, Venezuela is a country whose defense budget is probably 1/600th of the United States'. They own Citgo. It's unlikely that as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chavez that we are endangering the strategic interests of the United States. I don't think anybody can find any evidence that that would do so. Even within this imaginative crowd, I think you would be hard-pressed to paint a scenario in which U.S. interests would be damaged as a consequence of us having a more constructive relationship with Venezuela.

So if the question, Dan, is, how does this play politically, I don't know. One of the benefits of my campaign and how I've been trying to operate as President is I don't worry about the politics -- I try to figure out what's right in terms of American interests, and on this one I think I'm right.

(whitehouse.gov)

The fact checkers:

Robert Farley (writer)
Angie Drobnic Holan (researcher)
Bill Adair (editor)

Analysis:

Once again, we have an initial mystery as to why this statement is worthy of fact-checking at all. As with Rush Limbaugh's statement about Washington's speeches and Obama's comparison between lightning strike and prosecution of companies that hire illegals, this seems like a case of exaggeration for emphasis, also known as hyperbole.

For some reason, however, the issue piqued interest at PolitiFact:

Chavez has significantly increased the Venezuelan defense budget in recent years, and so we wondered about the 1/600th figure.

The Venezuelan military buildup explains skepticism about the literal numbers, but it doesn't do much to explain why normal figures of speech get treated as factual claims without any apparent recognition of those figures of speech.

To make the 10 paragraph story short, Venezuela's defense budget is "about 1/215th" the size of the U.S. defense budget. So the literal statement is incorrect. In the earlier cases of hyperbole, this resulted in the statement receiving the Truth-O-Meter rating of "False."

But not this time.

Once again, PolitiFact plays its shell game with the literal meaning and what they take as the overall point:

So, yes, Obama's numbers were a little off. We're not going to ding him too hard for that, though, as his overall point is correct.

clipped from www.politifact.com

And what was that overall point, again? My best guess suggests the answer comes from the second paragraph:

In a press conference after the summit, on April 19, 2009, Obama dismissed those critics, saying the Venezuelan military is not consequential enough to worry about.

If that was Obama's real point then he is an idiot. Think about it. How much is the Taliban paying for its military hardware? How much cash did AQI spend during the pre-surge dark period of the Iraq War? Expense is no good measure of the threat posed by a military branch. And, as the PolitiFact analysis should have shown, Venezuela's actions on the military front do make it a threat to U.S. interests in South America. Venezuela might have little difficulty making a puppet out of Bolivia or of helping to destabilize our allies in Colombia.

Bottom line, there are no aspects of Obama's statement amenable to normal fact checking. The real point of his statement concerned the importance of his appearance of offering weak responses to our enemies abroad. Obama essentially stated that he is not concerned about the political appearances of making nice with Hugo Chavez. But apparently he only meant the domestic political scene, because a very good argument can be made that the appearance of weakness such as Obama offered at the Summit of the Americas can produce adverse political consequences. The easiest example probably comes from President Kennedy's meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in 1961.

The two leaders met at the beginning of June. There was no clear agenda. On the first day they spoke about the world in general and about issues of war, peace. and revolution, failing to connect on almost any level. A Russian his­torian has written that Khrushchev had then "the complete confidence of a man riding on the crest of history." Kennedy was astonished at how strongly the Soviet leader came at him. At the end of the first day, aides of Khrushchev asked his opinion of Kennedy as a statesman. Khrushchev waved his hand dismissively, saying that Kennedy was no match for Eisenhower.
(Richard L. Langhill, Saint Martin's College)

Many political scientists and historians link the Vienna meeting to Khrushchev's subsequent provocation of placing Soviet missiles in Cuba.

Certainly Chavez does not have Khrushchev's resources at his disposal, but if the new millenium has taught us anything it is the threat posed by asymmetrical warfare. Obama's response to the question from CNN was as weak as his performance at the Summit of the Americas--and the world was watching both.

The Grades:

With precious little fact checking to assess, I can really only grade the team on its choice of subject matter.

Robert Farley: F
Angie Drobnic Holan: F
Bill Adair: F

I assume that Adair controlled the decision to publish this nonsense. The weight of the grade for the others, under that assumption, is negligible.


Update:

The PolitiFact site says that CQ staffers helped during the 2008 presidential campaign. That would make Times staffers solely responsible for content until CQ folks start to help out again.