Palin Attacks PolitiFact.com
Ben Smith notes that Sarah Palin is currently in a war of words with Politifact.com:
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is duking it out with PolitiFact.com, the fact-checking arm of the St. Petersburg Times, over her claim that “Democrats are poised to allow [the] largest tax increase in U.S. history” by letting the Bush tax cuts to expire.
Palin’s original statement — which suggested Democrats are planning to levy $3.8 trillion dollars over 10 years in new taxes on Americans — drew a spate of criticism from the left. PolitiFact weighed in with a post rating her assertion as “Pants on Fire,” arguing that the question to which Palin was responding, asked by Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, was about reinstating taxes on only the wealthiest 2 percent of households. In that scenario, PolitiFact cited $678 billion over 10 years as a “reasonable” estimate.
Palin responded yesterday in a post on her Facebook page, standing by the $3.8 trillion number and arguing a need to “fact-check the fact checkers” for doing “such a bad job.”
Palin’s main defense was the absence of any clear proposal from President Barack Obama or congressional Democrats stating an intention to limit the increase to wealthy taxpayers. But PolitiFact noted in a rebuttal posted today, “Obama has indeed published his proposals in some detail — at least twice, in the annual budget documents that the White House releases.”
PolitiFact also quoted a statement from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) supporting an extension of middle-class tax cuts, as well as experts from both the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center and the conservative American Enterprise Institute in its response, which gave Palin’s Facebook post a milder “False” rating.
The whole flap underscores just how dismissive of traditional news outlets Palin is at this point, as an organization generally considered scrupulous and fair falls under the "lamestream media" umbrella.
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