Lies of Obamacare: Lie of the year edition

Jonah Goldberg devotes a column to the foundational lies of Obamacare with special attention to the third — the one that promised billions of dollars in savings. “This lie took several forms,” Goldberg notes, and looks at a few of them, all of them false. “Obamacare may have been sold on a trinity of lies,” Goldberg concludes, “but it turns out it’s also lies all the way down.”

Goldberg’s column is well timed to coincide with the recognition accorded to the first of the foundational lies of Obamacare — “If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan” — as the lie of the year by the hacks of PolitiFact.

PolitiFact’s hackery extends to its write-up on the award. The lie of the year was exposed as such some five million times over this year and generated quite a buzz. According to PolitiFact, “The stunning political uproar generated by exposure of Obama’s statement led to this: a rare presidential apology.” Let it be noted for the record, this is not an apology, it is a mush-mouthed evasion:

I regret very much that what we intended to do, which is to make sure that everybody is moving into better plans because they want them, as opposed because they’re forced into it, that, you know, we weren’t as clear as we needed to be in terms of the changes that were taking place. And I want to do everything we can to make sure that people are finding themselves in a good position, a better position than they were before this law happened, and I am sorry that they, you know, are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got for me.

We’ve got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them and that we’re going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.

I rate PolitiFact’s assertion regarding “a rare presidential apology” half-true, at best.

And then there is this: “In six separate columns addressing the Obama claim’s truthfulness between 2008 and 2012, the Tampa Bay Times’ influential fact-checking group [i.e., PolitiFact] did not once correctly label it as false.” (It became definitively false in June 2010 at the latest, and the falsity extended well beyond Obama’s concession.)

Via Allahpundit/Hot Air.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll has more on PolitiFact’s award here and Sean Higgins has more here.

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