Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez complained on Twitter Monday about having her statements fact-checked, saying she’s under the same scrutiny as White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
“For example, it looks like @PolitiFact has fact-checked Sarah Huckabee Sanders and myself the same amount of times: 6,” Ocasio-Cortez posted. “She’s been serving for almost 2 years. I’ve served 4 days. Why is she fact-checked so little? Is she adhering to some standard we don’t know about?”
She also blasted the Washington Post, which gave her “Four Pinocchios” for her incorrect claim about $21 trillion in waste at the Pentagon.
“Or why did @washingtonpost give my confusing tweet on military accounting offsets the same ‘Pinocchios’ as Trump’s flat denial of how many Americans died in Puerto Rico?” she said in her series of tweets. “These are legitimate questions not intended to attack. Who makes these decisions? How? Is there a rubric?”
In another tweet, she questioned why she doesn’t get credit for telling the truth.
“I say true things all the time – I’d hope most do. When does Politifact choose to rate true statements?” she said.
Her Twitterstorm comes a day after she said in an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” that critics seizing on false words or figures are “missing the forest for the trees.”
“I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right,” she told host Anderson Cooper in the interview that aired Sunday.
She went on to say that her mistakes shouldn’t be equated with false comments made by President Trump.
“Whenever I make a mistake. I say, ‘OK, this was clumsy,’ and then I restate what my point was. But it’s not the same thing as the president lying about immigrants. It’s not the same thing, at all,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
But the Washington Post fact-checkers haven’t been easy on Trump.
By their calculations, Trump has uttered more than 7,600 untruths during the two years of his presidency – an average of 15 erroneous claims a day during 2018.
And Sanders got called out by Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday” when during an interview she claimed that “nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally, and we know that our most vulnerable point of entry is at our southern border.”
Wallace fact-checked her in real time.
“And the State Department says that there is, quote, their words: no credible evidence of any terrorist coming across the border from Mexico,” he said.
“Do you know where those 4,000 people come – where they’re captured?” Wallace asked her. “Airports.”
“Not always,” she said.
“At airports,” he insisted.
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