The Washington Post's "three Pinocchios" for AOC shows how incoherent mainstream "fact-checking" really is. : A truth that’s told with bad intentBeats any lie you can invent – William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence" Fact-checking political discourse is noble in theory, but it can easily go wrong. That's what happened in 2011, when PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year” -- the claim that Republicans wanted to end Medicare -- was actually true, as Paul Krugman, Steve Bennen and others pointed out.