Political Whoppers of 2010

http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/the-gaggle/2010/12/17/government-takeover-of-fiction.html?GT1=43002

Our friends at the nonpartisan Politifact watch American politics in the way that would make most people’s stomachs churn. All year, they chronicle every bit of political discourse, every hysterical pundit and every government vow or rally cry in a sometimes quixotic effort to separate truth from fiction.

Now, in the traditional end-of-year retrospective, all the lies have been tabulated. And during a year of enormous whoppers, the site’s editors have identified the biggest deception of all:

The so-called government takeover of health care.

It’s possible to say that the Democrats’ 2010 health-care reform will increase government regulation, which it will. It’s legitimate to say that it may cost more than President Obama vowed, because it might. And it’s possible to have a constitutional argument, which several federal courts have done, about the legal mandate to purchase insurance.

But government takeover, according to the site’s scribes, is wholly inaccurate. It carries the implication that the U.S. health care system will begin to mirror those in the U.K. and Canada, where the government literally runs hospitals and employs doctors. That, ironically, is what the most liberal Democrats had wanted. But the law they got fell far short, thus making the “government takeover” meme a pretty big stretch.

Instead, it was used as an obvious scare tactic.

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Politifact has the whole list of half-truths and untruths on its site.

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