Spin Cycle

A lot of factchecking from the Democratic debate Monday is now up on the web. It indicates that truth does not seem to be a prized commodity when Hillary goes to war, but Obama and Edwards sacrifice it too.For reasons that remain unclear, the political culture seems to have come to accept that presidential candidates don't have to tell the truth -- it's noted, but it's really not that big a deal when they make stuff up.

In fact, it's rewarded. The three major non-partisan factchecking sites, as noted below, all concluded that Hillary was not telling the truth when she said Obama had represented a slumlord after Obama brought up her work for Wal-Mart -- but her distorted comment leads to AP, the NYT, the Boston Globe, the LA Times and both Chicago dailies doing takeouts on Obama's relationship with Tony Rezko. A scolding by factcheckers is a small price to pay.

Factcheck.org becomes the latest to conclude that the Clintons' four-day campaign to claim that Obama had endorsed Reagan-Republican ideas was "flatly false," and that -- to add insult to injury -- the Clintons themselves have given Reagan more fulsome praise than Obama did.

The Annenberg School site also concluded that Hillary's charge that Obama represented Rezko as a lawyer was "untrue," and that she falsely claimed that the Chicago Tribune had criticized Obama's "present" votes as a state legislator when in fact the paper had quoted a Hillary supporter criticizing him. As for Obama, the fact check concludes that his denial that he once supported a single-payer health plan did not hold up, and he mischaracterized Hillary's vote on a bankruptcy bill. Edwards was "misleading" in his suggestion that polls showed he was the only one beating McCain.

Politifact.com, likewise, concludes Hillary continued to "twist" and "repeatedly distort" Obama's comments about Reagan and Republicans. It called her comments about Rezko "barely true" and "a fragment of truth, distorted." Obama was criticized for falsely claiming that Hillary called NAFTA a "boon" to the economy in 2006, based on an unattributed assertion in an item in Newsday.

Bonus distortion! The Politifact site also explores, and finds "misleading" and "half-true" Hillary's repeated claim that she's working against "the Pentagon trying to take away signing bonuses when a soldier gets wounded." It's not quite what the Pentagon does, and she's one of 18 co-sponsors on a bill that originated in the House!

The Washington Post Fact-checker site says both candidates engaged in a "false comparisons" in their Wal-Mart vs. Rezko exchange, but while Obama's mud was technically true, Hillary's involved "significant omissions and/or exagerrations" and created a "false, misleading impression." Also, the site finds the Clintons have distorted Obama's stance on Iraq and Reagan.

And: MSNBC's First Read assesses Hillary's claim that in some polls she's beating the Republicans "higher" than anyone else. The site can't find a single poll in which that's true.