Kevin Drum discusses fact-checking. The deficit is falling. In fact, it's falling at a pretty good clip, even though a lot of folks think it's likely to start growing again. So when Eric Cantor refers to our "growing deficit," is he wrong? I'd say he is because he's deliberately (it seems to me) painting an incomplete picture. If he said, "Yes, our deficit is falling now but there's good reason to believe it will begin to start growing again," he'd be accurate. But his goal pretty clearly is not to admit anything is good news under Obama…so I say it's a lie. Or a willful distortion, if you prefer.
The problem, of course, is that he said it on Fox News where no one, except Chris Wallace on token occasions, is going to say to him, "Congressman, you refer to our 'growing deficit.' The Congressional Budget Office says the deficit is shrinking at the fastest rate in over 60 years." And then he'd say, "Yes, well, that's a short term look at the problem and here's why…" and it all might result in a true picture of the situation, especially if anyone noted that projections of future deficits are not the same thing as current reports of what's actually happening. The deficits might not increase the way Cantor (and to be fair, some Democrats) expect.
As for Politifact and a few others like that, I think they're usually accurate if you carefully parse the claims they're analyzing but they sometimes don't look at what the public is likely to hear. In the above example, all most viewers are going to hear from Cantor's statement is that the deficit is currently growing. Which it isn't. You know, when the stock market goes down, we say it's going down. We don't say it's going up because we know that eventually it will.