Posted on 01/27/2021 4:23:19 AM PST by Kaslin
The new White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, came to the briefing room on Tuesday with domestic policy adviser Susan Rice. This came two days after CNN's Brian Stelter celebrated the "refreshing" arrival of "transparency and truth" at the briefings.
Rice is best remembered in conservative circles for spewing falsehoods on five Sunday talk shows on Sept. 16, 2012, when she was White House national security adviser: She claimed the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans was a "spontaneous reaction" to an Islamophobic YouTube video, not a terrorist attack. "Protesters" showed up with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, but the attack was somehow "spontaneous." CBS later reported Team Obama knew on Sept. 11, the day of the attack, that it was a terrorist attack.
Seeing Rice at the White House podium this week, a friend of mine suggested Rice has never been "fact-checked." Well, that can't be, I thought. Then I went to the PolitiFact website, which strangely had a Susan Rice page ... but not a single "fact-check" of Rice, even though PolitiFact was founded in 2007 and Rice worked for then-President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017. It never put her on its tilted "Truth-O-Meter."
It turns out PolitiFact gave then-press secretary Jay Carney a "Mostly False" rating in 2013 for saying there was no effort by Rice to "play down" the terrorism angle in interviews. But Rice evaded a rating.
As PolitiFact did for Sen. Elizabeth Warren's claims of having Cherokee ancestry, it addressed Rice's unmasking controversy in April 2017 with an article "in context" (avoiding the Truth-O-Meter). The headline read, "In context: Did Susan Rice lie about unmasking Trump associates?" On "PBS NewsHour," anchor Judy Woodruff asked Rice "whether Trump transition officials, including the president, may have been swept up in surveillance of foreigners at the end of the Obama administration." Rice said, "I know nothing about this."
By then, Bloomberg had reported that Rice made requests to unmask then-President Donald Trump's aides. Last May, we learned Rice sent an email to herself noting that she attended an Oval Office meeting on Jan. 5, 2017, to discuss surveillance of her successor, Michael Flynn.
But PolitiFact's Lauren Carroll couldn't decide on truthfulness: "At this point, too little is known about the allegations against Rice ... to assess whether Rice's March 22 comment ... was truthful."
The indecision is almost amusing. "(L)ooking at the PBS interview in its full context, it's not 100 percent clear that Rice made an intentionally false statement, though she might have omitted relevant (and potentially classified) information," Carroll wrote.
PolitiFact instead threw a "False" rating at Republican Sen. Tom Cotton for claiming "it is unusual" for a national security adviser "to make unmasking requests."
Then, in August 2020, as Rice was mentioned as a potential running mate for Biden, PolitiFact's Louis Jacobson evaluated the Benghazi incident (no Truth-O-Meter). "Our review of transcripts found that Rice consistently emphasized the importance of the video," he explained. "In fact, she told CBS's 'Face the Nation' that 'we do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.'" Jacobson balanced it out with a quote from Rice in which she claims any criticism is "is dishonest, and it's a distraction," as well as quotes from "experts" who beat around the bush by arguing that the false "talking points" weren't hers.
In addition, Jacobson noted, "Rice acknowledged to House investigators in September 2017 that she had unmasked Flynn and other Trump officials to understand why the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates was in New York in late 2016." Somehow, Jacobson couldn't find the space to compare this acknowledgement with how Rice claimed on PBS in 2017 that she knew nothing.
PolitiFact has been protecting Susan Rice, not acting on behalf of "transparency and truth."
“Fact Checking” is basically a popularity contest. If the Democrats like you, you are truthful. If the Democrats don’t like you, then you are lying, have no evidence, and everything you say has already been debunked.
““Fact Checking” is basically a popularity contest. If the Democrats like you, you are truthful.”
Fact checking is another leftist propaganda tool, with its facts spewed in a coordinated fashion across multiple media outlets and through the mouths of Democrat politicians. To effectively counter this tool a conservative “fact check” organization needs to be created which will reply with sourced factual retorts to the distortion.
We've had that for some time.......here on FR.
But we could take it a step further ..... now that we have "The Office of The Former President,"
we could refer the troublesome left's vomitous there, and have the force of that office bury lefy agit-prop.
Nails it. This is the MO of organized crime. Connecting the dots, we can clearly see Democrats, and that ilk,
use the Organized Crime Playbook to hang onto power.
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CASE IN POINT--- In a stunning turnabout, serial liar "Rice acknowledged to House investigators Sept 2017 that she
had unmasked Gen Flynn (who was her successor and about to discover all the Obaminations she had cooked up w/ the Halfrican).
Rice had also "unmasked" other Trump officials to (cough) "understand" why UAR's crown prince was in New York in late 2016.
PolitiFact must have been paid well.....they couldn't report Rice's newfound
conspiracy theory with Rice's original lie on PBS in 2017 that she knew "nothing."
“Politifact”. Irony...
Article keeps misspelling “Fact-Chucker.”
The left competes over how far it can chuck the truth. One of their leaders is named for this skill. We instead compete over how far we can chuck pumpkins. But our world is full of zanies and fools, who expect our pumpkins to turn into golden carriages. While the left rants about impossible bumpkins we keep washing their San Fran chucks off our glass slippers.
“We’ve had that for some time.......here on FR.”
The Free Republic doesn’t have the same distribution as Politifact and the other fact checking services. If the RNC was truly a voice for individual liberty and in opposition to the leftist agenda, it would set up a fact checking department and issue press releases daily. It is easy for the mainstream press to ignore the Free Republic and call it a fringe right wing element. It is much more difficult to ignore a mainstream major political party.
No question the RNC has been delinquent on a lot of issues.......but please do not underestimate the reach of FR.
We post here on the world-wide web.......we reach every corner of the globe.
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