No Lie

Ramesh Ponnuru on PolitiFact:

The reason we have politics at all is that we disagree, sometimes deeply, about how to promote the common good, and we need a peaceful and productive way to resolve or at least manage these disagreements. We disagree about how to improve U.S. health care, and we disagree about how each other’s proposals to change it should be characterized. The pretense of PolitiFact, and other media “fact checkers,” is that many of our political disputes have obvious correct answers on which all reasonable people looking fairly at the evidence can agree -- and any other answer is “simply not true.”

This pretense really is false, and like dishonesty, it is corrosive.

Glenn Greenwald makes essentially the same point here.