The ideological pyromaniacs at PolitiFact

In my most recent "Grading PolitiFact" story I mused that President Obama's "False" rating would probably drop to "Pants on Fire" if it had come instead from a Republican.

PolitiFact has helpfully provided an illustration bearing out the truth of my statement.

PolitiFact had graded Obama "False" on his statement that a Supreme Court overturn of his health care law would represent "an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."  There was nothing true about Obama's statement.  There was simply a subsequent explanation semantically irreconcilable with Obama's original statement.

In Ryan's case, PolitiFact ruled "Pants on Fire" a statement that was true given its most charitable interpretation:

UPDATE: After our story appeared, Ryan’s office got back to us. They said that they had been using fiscal year 2008 as their base year, rather than fiscal year 2009. Using the 2008 figures, federal outlays do roughly double between 2008 and 2021 under Obama’s fiscal year 2012 budget proposal. However, we think it’s inaccurate to use fiscal 2008 as the base year, since that year ended about four months before Obama took office. In any case, our previous concerns -- using figures for 2021, when Obama will have been out of office for either five or nine years, and ignoring the role of mandatory spending in expanding federal outlays -- still stand, and we’re keeping the rating at Pants on Fire.

It makes sense to PolitiFact to use as a baseline a fiscal year for which Obama was partially responsible for the spending--including the initial spending from his 2009 stimulus bill.  How nice to have one of your most expensive legislative initiatives partially included in the baseline to which your increases in spending are compared!   It's a little like timing your leg of a track relay starting a full second after you receive the baton.  Wow!  Fast!

Even under PolitiFact's original reasoning, using fiscal year 2009 as the baseline, it calculated a 66 percent increase in spending by the end of Obama's 10-year budget, and Ryan's statement in context clearly referred to that budget projection.  Hilariously, PolitiFact scolded Ryan because he supposedly should know better.  No such scolding resulted from Obama's head-scratching comment about constitutional law despite his history teaching constitutional law.

Ryan:  "Pants on Fire"
Obama:  "False"
PolitiFact:  Untrustworthy.

PolitiFact has had since 2007 to figure out how to apply its standards consistently.  It doesn't look like it will ever happen.