Fact-Checking the Fact Checkers

I was reading the Cleveland Plain Dealer this morning and I came across this PolitiFact article titled "Even in an age of fact checking, the whopper lives."  The article, written by reporter Henry Gomez, focuses criticism on the supposed lies told by current Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel and his refusal to back down from those lies.  I want to instead focus on a self-evident and apparently unquestionable truth as cited by Gomez in his article.  Gomez writes that politicians "have been lying since the beginning of the republic" and then states the following as evidence that lying on a voluminous scale still continues to this day:

The two previous presidential administrations are perhaps best known for lies or untruths -- see Lewinsky, Monica, and weapons of mass destruction. And even in this, another presidential election year, rare is the day when a candidate does not utter or repeat a claim that will be debunked by PolitiFact or another independent truth squad.

Hmmm...if President Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction, then so did President Clinton, virtually every member of Congress, and virtually everyone involved in national defense in both the Bush and Clinton Administrations.   As John Hinderaker has noted time and time again, "But the 'false belief in weapons of mass destruction' was not some sort of popular (let alone Republican) delusion. It was the considered judgment of the CIA and every other intelligence agency, world-wide."  Moreover, it's hard to believe that the weapons that were still unaccounted for by the U.N. since the Gulf War were not shipped out of the country as soon as Saddam discovered that U.S. forces were preparing to invade.

I don't have time to fact check the entire "fact-checking" article, but I can take a guess that this isn't the only falsehood. 

For a take-down of the whole fact-checking craze, read this article in the The Weekly Standard.