I often find that i like Politifact's articles even while i find their rating system bewildering. For example, when Politifact rated Bernie Sanders' claim about the US being the only major country without a guaranteed right to health care, i found myself nodding along through the various caveats but it sure seemed like the basic claim was True or at least Mostly True, not Half True.

And now we have the statement that Clinton used against Sanders in the two most recent debates, where after Sanders criticized Clinton's position on Libya, Clinton said that Sanders voted for it. Both times Sanders got cut off before he could respond, so i'm glad that Politifact looked into it. And again, i read the article, and per the information there, it seems clear to me that Clinton was full of shit, but Politifact rated her claim True.

As Politifact notes, "Congress never voted to authorize U.S. military action in Libya", so the reality is that there was no vote on Clinton (and Obama's) action. Sanders did vote in the Senate in favor of a non-binding resolution "strongly condemning the gross and systematic violations of human rights in Libya", but that's hardly the same thing as voting for military action to remove (kill) a dictator. And as Sanders said at the time:

Look, everybody understands Gaddafi is a thug and murderer... We want to see him go, but I think in the midst of two wars (in Iraq and Afghanistan), I'm not quite sure we need a third war, and I hope the president tells us that our troops will be leaving there, that our military action in Libya will be ending very, very shortly.

All of these quotes come from Politifact, and yet they rate Clinton's statement True. I don't get it. Especially in the context of the debates, where Sanders was criticizing Clinton's inclinations toward "regime change", Clinton's use of this vote seems to me like a cheap gotcha with no real substance to it, and the information in the Politifact article seems to back me up on that. But their rating doesn't.

Part of the problem is the wording. What does "major country" mean? (Bernie said OECD countries but only after people started to question his claim.) Hillary didn't say that Sanders supported military action, she said that Sanders supported removing Qadafi. If someone says that a politician supported removing Nixon as President in 1974, they presumably don't mean the politician was in favor of kidnapping Nixon.
The other problem is that things aren't neatly divided into true and false. For example, look at their take on Limbaugh's claim that Ted Kennedy tried to go behind Reagan's back to work with the Soviets:
http://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/statements/2015/apr/12/mackubin-thomas-owens/disputed-kgb-memo-sparks-mac-owens-claim-kennedy-t/
Their argument is essentially that Tunney and Kennedy denied the memo, so the memo is probably false, so they rated Limbaugh's claim as false. But another way of looking at it is that Tunney and Kennedy were lying and the memo is real, in which case Limbaugh's claim should be rated as mostly true. The memo isn't a proven forgery like the Hitler Diaries. There's no way to definitively settle the issue- whether you believe Tunney and Kennedy over the memo or vice versa depends on your opinion of Tunney and Kennedy.