Some say the Earth is round, but others disagree. We'll cover the controversy later on MSNBC!

MSNBC.com reports that some members of the Dutch government are upset at how that piece of shit Santorum lied about euthanasia in the Netherlands.

“They have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, but half the people who are euthanized every year, and it’s 10 percent of all deaths, half of those people are euthanized involuntarily in hospitals, because they are older and sick,” Santorum said. “So elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital. They go to another country. Because they’re afraid because of budget purposes they will not come out of that hospital if they go in with sickness.”

On Thursday, Dutch Member of Parliament Frans Timmermans, a leading member of the opposition left-leaning Labor Party in The Hague, blasted his government’s silence.

He wrote in a post on his Facebook page that he wanted Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal to rebuke Santorum for his “scandalous accusations,” The Times reported.

“This cannot be allowed to rest,” he wrote, according to The Times.

And how does MSNBC handle this? By refusing to look up the facts themselves! Instead, they left that to Factcheck.org.

FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan project that monitors the factual accuracy of what is said by U.S. politicians, said Santorum “grossly mischaracterized” euthanasia practices in the Netherlands.

It said the former Pennsylvania senator overstated the rate of euthanasia. Government statistics show euthanasia is climbing but represented only 2.3 percent of all deaths in the Netherlands in 2010, it said.

FactCheck.org said Santorum’s claims that the elderly are being killed against their will and wear “do not euthanize me” bracelets are false.

Dutch euthanasia review boards found nine cases in 2010 where doctors “had not acted in accordance with the due care criteria,” mostly for how the procedure was performed — not because it was against anyone’s will, FactCheck.org said. It added that the Dutch government and medical association say no such “Don’t euthanize me” bracelets exist.

A perfect little "he said, she they said" story: just the way our cowardly spineless press likes em. MSNBC gets to avoid appearing partisan by never directly challenging the words of a Republican. They just play neutral observer, even-handedly giving each side of the story a chance to state their case. They don't even bother to tell you which side they suspect might be right. They just report the controversy and let readers figure it out for themselves. Bunch of fucking cowards.

If they would just point out when people are flat-out lying about easily-verifiable facts, there would be no need for anything like Factcheck.org, and the country would a whole lot smarter. Hell, politicians and their supporters might even get used to the idea that they can't lie about simple facts. And then the media could go back to sleep for a few years.