Last year, the “fact checking” organization gave its “lie of the year” award to conservatives who said that the health-care law President Obama signed amounted to a “government takeover” of health care. This year, it gave its award to liberals who said that Republicans had tried to “end Medicare.” My take:

PolitiFact was wrong last year and this year — in each case injecting a little poison into the political system in the name of cleaning it up. . . . One of the worst features of contemporary politics is the tendency — found on the right, on the left and in between — to label our opponents liars, often without a shred of evidence that the person we’re attacking is saying something he knows to be false. PolitiFact makes that problem worse, not better, by giving a supposedly authoritative imprimatur to such loose accusations.