PolitiFact Circles Wagons Around Elizabeth Warren with a Pants-On-Fire Smear
Days before the Democrat Party’s anticipated electoral scalping, PolitiFact has published a shameless rehab article on Senator Elizabeth Warren. That article attacks a FaceBook meme I published over six months ago that mocks the DNC’s chief Cherokee who “lives in a $5.4M mansion, claimed ‘Native American’ status to score a Harvard gig paying $350,000 to teach one class, and now lectures us that ‘the system is rigged to benefit the rich.’ “ Of those 5 or so facts, PolitiFact cherry picks the first one and, violating its own written policy, proclaims the entire Meme “mostly false” based solely on a flawed analysis of that one cherry picked fact.
Yes, Politifact is helping Senator Elizabeth Warren reapply her war paint in time for a 2016 challenge against presumptive Democrat nominee Grandma Hil-Billy.
Styling herself as having “come up the hard way” in a middle class American family, Warren is the infamous one-percenter spouting such Marxist drivel as “there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.” She falsely claimed Native American status in applying to Harvard Law School, invoking affirmative action status with stereotyping (Indians have high cheekbones) derived from unsubstantiated family lore.
PolitiFact exposes an apparent partisan slant by attacking a small-time conservative satirist – me – instead of major leftwing media sites like Buzzfeed and Huffington Post that also wrote of Warren’s “$5M mansion” long before I created the Meme. Obviously, targeting leftwing journalists would muddy the narrative of false “critics’ claims” by conservatives against the Left’s favorite Cherokee Princess. Instead, Politifacts performs a partisan rain dance. Apparently, my little Meme has been highly effective in succinctly communicating Warren’s hypocrisy in 36 words, with over 24,000 shares on one FB user’s page alone.
In its rush to defend Warren’s honor, PolitiFact violates its own written standard that with compound statements containing “two or more factual assertions … we rate the overall accuracy after looking at the individual pieces.” PolitiFact makes no pretense of complying with this rule, stating the Meme’s many fact assertions are “a lot to chew on, so we’ll limit our analysis here to the claim that Warren “lives in a $5.4 million mansion,” then issues its “Mostly False” judgment on the entire Meme and all of its statements, saying it “overshoots the facts of the case”. Whether sloppy un-Pulitizer-like writing (accuracy can be discarded when it’s “a lot to chew on”), or clumsy deception, PolitiFact smears the entire Meme in disingenuous manner. I’m guessing that Warren needs the first few Google hits to deflect from and so whitewash her previously claimed Redskin dishonor as the race for 2016 begins.
Worse, PolitiFact’s article perverts its self-styled role of “exposing” false attacks because the supposedly false fact – Warren’s $5M mansion – originated with Warren herself in a sworn financial statement that her home’s value was $1M to $5M. Rather than attacking Warren, or her oath, or her financial statement, or news media reporting it, PolitiFact instead attacks the satirical messenger, implying that critics should not rely on a public figure’s sworn statement about personal finances.
To pronounce my Meme “Mostly False”, Politifacts must 1) excuse the original source for the home valuation itself — Warren’s 2011 financial disclosure signed under oath; 2) ignore multiple liberal media sites predating the Meme by months; 3) focus solely on the theoretical present day value of Warren’s home, excluding the land on which it sits; and 4) ignore the other factual points in the Meme.
For violating its own standards and a deceptive, apparently partisan attack, I rate the PolitiFact article defending Princess Warren as speaking with forked tongue.
