Outrage du Jour - 2015-02-25

Politifact attempted to check an aside in Jonah Goldberg's recent column on "gotcha" questions posed to Scott Walker:

As my National Review colleague Kevin Williamson notes, “Everybody wants to know what Scott Walker and Sarah Palin think about evolution, but almost nobody is asking what Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama think about homeopathy, acupuncture, aromatherapy and the like.” Even though such remedies have been given elevated legitimacy under the Affordable Care Act.

The quote is from Kevin Williamson's article here. Specifically:

I have made the point here a dozen times — and you’d think that one of these big-on-science guys like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye would take up the cause — that there is in reality an important federal project under way giving rank pseudoscience and pure hokum the force of law: Obamacare, which, thanks to the efforts of Senator Tom Harkin (D., Iowa), will oblige taxpayers to subsidize all manner of scientifically illegitimate “alternative medicine.” Everybody wants to know what Scott Walker and Sarah Palin think about evolution, but almost nobody is asking what Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama think about homeopathy, acupuncture, aromatherapy, and the like. The same people who are scandalized that Walker doesn’t want to talk about something that he doesn’t know the first thing about celebrate as the most important health-care advance in a generation a law that treats as legitimate sundry species of quackery based in pure mysticism.

The point Jonah and Kevin assert about Obamacare is somewhat tangential to the main point of their articles, but that's what the Politifact-checker, Lou Jacobson, chose to "factcheck".

And deemed it "Partially True". Because “it leaves out important details.”

Really?

A fair reading of Jacobsen's "analysis" reveals that those statements are true, full stop.

I can't do better than Jonah's response. Key:

As best I can tell, [Jacobsen's quibbles] amount to the fact that Jacobson doesn’t like the fact that my statement was entirely true. So he meanders along pointing out things I didn’t mention (because there was no need to) as a way to lessen the blow of the point I was making.

Also amusing: Jacobsen asserts:

(Neither Williamson nor Goldberg returned inquiries for this fact-check.)

Jacobsen's "inquiries" were (1) e-mail message to one of Jonah's public addresses and (2) a tweet to Kevin.

This last bit inspired an article devoted to ridicule on Twitchy. And Kevin's response … well, remind me never to get on his bad side:

Bottom line: Politifact is useless partisan hackery.


Last Modified 2019-01-09 5:11 AM EDT