PolitiFact picks the Lie of the Year for 2013

PolitiFact picks the Lie of the Year for 2013

The Democrats took the dishonor this year, narrowing the gap to 3-2 in the Obama years. The Republicans took an early lead back in 2009-10, but the Democrats are coming on strong, having won two of the past three years.

Previous winners:

2012 - the Romney campaign's ad on jeeps made in China

2011 - the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee claimed "Republicans voted to end Medicare."

2010 - Republicans claimed the Obamacare plan was a "government takeover of health care."

2009 - Republicans claimed that the health care plan included "death panels."

This year's winner was "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it." I'm not sure that exact statement was actually a lie, since we cannot distinguish between a lie and an error without knowing his intentions and what he thought to be true at the time. It may have just been an error on his part. I think he may have genuinely felt that the grandfather clause in the law was stronger than it actually was. But we don't need to assess his motivation on that specific statement because he got caught in a ginormous whopper when he tried to weasel out of trouble in the face of the media storm by saying, "Now, if you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law, and you really liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law passed." That follow-up statement was not only a lie, but was a whopper of Cheneyesque magnitude, in that the President tried to deny something that he had said on the public record many times. For example, Obama had specifically told the American Medical Association in 2009: "If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, PERIOD. No one will take it away, NO MATTER WHAT."