That’s because it’s not always easy to determine what the truth is or what was meant by a politician’s statement. “Pants on fire” doesn’t always mean “lie”, it’s generally used by politifact to just denote that something is so badly wrong it gets their worst rating. But often a politician can honestly get a fact completely wrong, while others can cynically tell half truths that they know are extremely misleading. Cecil seems to get the nuance better on difficult questions than the fact checking sites. Maybe they should hire him!
But all that said, fact checking sites are valuable. But as with any assertions, they are challengable.
“Completely under his control?” I wasn’t aware that we elected a dictator.
Back to the topic at hand, when Netanyahu said that the 2003 invasion of Iraq would set off a chain reaction of democratization of the Middle East, do you judge that to be a lie? If Netanyahu is incorrect that the agreement will result in a nuclear Iran, would you judge him a liar on that count, too?
That’s a prediction and by nature predictions cannot be lies. This isn’t as hard as you’re making it sound. On the individual mandate, the President said he opposed it, that it was unnecessary. After his election, he did a total 180. He could have said that he would not support an individual mandate. He came out in full support. It was a broken promise and is rightly rated as a broken promise.
In the case of Iran, I expect the agreement to have what he said it would have. I realize that’s a lot to ask, but he said we had a framework. The framework is the broad outlines of the deal. The deal should have in it all that the administration said was in it. If it’s not, then we need to know the reason why.
So if predictions cannot be lies, the 2008 statement “you can keep your health insurance” could not be a lie as Terr believes it is, since it is presupposing the bill that Congress would write. Do we agree?
No, because that wasn’t a prediction, it was a promise. A promise he had total control over, since the grandfathering regulations were his to write. He wrote them restrictively so that insurance companies would be required to drop their plans if they made the slightest changes to them. That was not a choice he actually had to make, and when called on it and a media furor erupted, he did the right thing as a “temporary” fix. The actual right thing to do would have been to simply grandfather in all plans without restrictions, but that wasn’t the path he chose.
And BTW, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s kinda been a lot of democratization going on in the Arab world. Funny that you missed that.
Now the President can’t control whether or not Iran gets a bomb totally. If he does everything in his power to prevent it and it happens anyway, he failed, but he didn’t lie. But if this deal does not have anything remotely resembling the framework he told us about, how can that be regarded as anything but dishonesty? He said we had a framework. Do we or don’t we?
“Everything in his power” includes, according to his repeated statements over the years, using the military option. So if he doesn’t use it and Iran “gets a bomb” then yes, he lied.
Yep. He said force was on the table. If it was a bluff, well, that’s a lie. He was bluffing. BTW, the US doesn’t bluff. That would be quite the change in policy and bring a whole lot of other things into question, like our doctrine of nuclear retaliation if we are attacked by nukes. Bluffing is a very dangerous thing to do in our position. Our threats have to be credible.
We shouldn’t have bluffed then either. We shouldn’t have threatened war to begin with. I would hope that everyone who opposes war with Iran no matter what would also have preferred that the US never threatened it. Supporting a policy of bluffing is disastrous.
And when he announced a grandfathering of plans for another two years, Boehner said he was breaking the law. If he grandfathers plans, he’s breaking the law. If he doesn’t, he’s a liar. Is there anything that he could have done on this issue that meets conservative approval? No? Then it’s a disingenuous criticism.
Process matters in a nation of laws. What the President had power over was the regulations covering grandfathering. Rather than change them, he issued new regulations, just on his say-so, grandfathering plans without actually changing the grandfathering regulations in question.
It’s not clear whether he can do that or not, but it’s certainly not the kosher way to do it. Correcting his broken promise was easy. He elected not to correct it, and in fact left it open for states to decline to join this new “program”.
That’s because losing your insurance was a necessary part of ACA all along and that process needed to occur as much as it was politically possible for it to occur.
And you wonder why Republicans don’t trust the President.
Yuh-huh. The whole Obamacare is evil thing is clearly a dispute about the President failing to put a cover sheet in his TPS reports - I mean, filing the incorrect form for amending regulations. Yup, that’s the whole thing. We’re a nation of laws, and Barack HUSSEIN Obama fills out a form OMB-276 instead of OMB-128? Dictator! Evil! Uuuuuuuuuuusurper!
Missing the point. There is an objective distinction to be made between what is a political attack and what is genuinely shady. The fact that Republicans would have attacked him no matter what he did is relevant from a political perspective and totally irrelevant from a policy perspective. He pursued the wrong policy and he did so in a way to avoid keeping his promise while appearing to do so. He also did not use proper, traditional, legal practices. The right way to change a regulation is to amend the actual regulation, not issue an executive order temporarily shielding people from the regulation under limited circumstances.
It’s possible for both sides to be wrong. In politics, it’s almost a given that both sides are bullshitting, at the very least. We’re seeing the same dynamic on Iran. The President relentlessly spun the framework to make it look as good as possible then criticized Republicans for spinning, solemnly declaring that it’s wrong to use spin when talking about foreign policy. A day later, Iran let us know that the PResident was spinning. No apology to the Republicans has been forthcoming, or the people for insulting our intelligence.
I think I hit this point right on the head. Comrade Obama undermined the Constitution and acted like a dictator by issuing an addendum rather than an appendix. He is truly a madman!!!
I suppose if one has more trust in Iranians than the democratically elected President of the United States, believing that the Iranians are more honest than Obama explains a lot. But it explains more about Republicans than it does the framework.
Says someone from the side that not a week before was making fun of Republicans because supposedly Iran knew more about our constitution than they did.
If you truly believed that the framework was closer to what the administration said it was you wouldn’t be laying the groundwork to defend an agreement more in line with what Iran is demanding.
Literally nothing you wrote in this post has the slightest relation to anything I’ve written or thought, so either you must have me confused with someone, you don’t actually understand anything I post, or you treat every other poster on this message board as fodder for your straw man arguments. I’m really not sure which of those options is closer to the truth.
This is not an accurate representation of the facts based on what’s out there. You’ve presented nothing that supports the idea that Iran (and the Republicans, I suppose) are the “honest” ones and the President is not.