The Media Research Center’s Tim Graham writes in a Jan. 12 post:
One of the routine ways the “independent fact checkers” demonstrate a liberal bias is by leaping to attack conservatives for making a rhetorical flourish on cable news. On Tuesday, PolitiFact threw a Pants On Fire” verdict at former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley for saying no government is protesting the killing of Iranian terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani, only Democrats are “mourning the loss of Soleimani.”
One of the routine ways Graham conducts his war on fact-checking is to nit-pick the claims in order to present them as unfair to conservatives. Here, he pretends that words don’t mean things and insists without evidence that Haley’s accusation of “mourning” was not meant to be taken literally though Haley never indicated otherwise — and then goes Godwin:
PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson and Amy Sherman then dutifully listed top Democrat leaders saying Soleimani was a bad guy, but. It’s true that the Democrats didn’t wear black and go into mourning. But they intensely criticized the military action.
It’s also not strictly factual for Democrats to say Trump is Hitler. Or Putin’s puppet. But those kinds of statements are very rarely noticed by the PolitiFact squad.
Conveniently, Graham never cites anyone of similar stature to Haley claiming that “Trump is Hitler.” And there is certainly enough evidence to show that the idea of Trump being Putin’s puppet is, at the very least, not inaccurate.
Graham then goes into his old whataboutism schtick: “A review of PolitiFact ‘Truth-o-Meter’ rulings shows that no Democrats have been tagged for making wild or false statements on the subject of the Soleimani strike.”
That’s the kind of rhetorical dishonesty Graham has to resort to in order to keep his silly right-wing narrative alive.