…How do we go from “number of lies” to “most honest”? If all a candidate ever lies about is whether or not Iraq has nuclear weapons, it’s still fair to say that their lies had an awful lot more impact than the president who told a hundred lies about whether or not he slept with any given intern.
The facts be damned, you know what’s true!
adaher is able to read liberals’ minds, whether they’re holding political office or just posters at the Dope. Many other conservative Dopers seem to have the same super-power. It’s uncanny.
Rating: Mostly False
Actually I would still rate it as a mostly true statement.
Much like …
In America you can buy any car you like…
Yeah you can, subject to the myriad of laws governing car safety etc…
The statements are likely picked because someone, somewhere says “that’s wrong!”
That statement is untrue, as this thread proved in the OP.
Jeez, adaher, way to set yourself up.
Bad analogy.
The point of him saying “you can keep your health plan” was that the government wasn’t going to create a single-payer or govenrment-run plan to force people into. It wasn’t going to limit choices. It was a simplified way of saying that. Simplification can backfire sometimes, but normally we give that a pass.
So it has nothing to do with meaning “most of you can keep your health plan.” What Obama meant was “if your health plan is adequate and not a sham plan, you can keep it.” It would be more like Bush saying “soldiers won’t be killed in Iraq” and then no soldier dies in combat, but a few die from truck accidents or food poisoning.
Determining who is and is not honest is not something one can measure with data. The public is a better judge of that than anyone else, and guess who the public things is the least honest and trustworthy?
Next thing you know, someone will trot out data showing who is smarter, more moral, and prettier.
We can measure factual accuracy with data, and that at least has some overlap with honesty, as well as judgment and analytical skills.
So by this measure of honesty, judgment, and analytical skills, Hillary is far, far above her Republican opponents and critics, as is Obama.
Secondly, the fact check sites don’t claim what the OP claims. That’s entirely his reasoning. When this is the kind of thing they fact check:
Kasich got this quote wrong, “If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.” He attributed it to Truman. What a liar. CAn’t trust him in office. That is obviously exactly the same as Clinton’s consistent misrepresentations of Bernie Sanders’ record:
A better metric is the Daily Show, actually. Kasich getting a quoter wrong is not all that cringeworthy. Hillary Clinton saying, “Where was Bernie Sanders when I was fighting for health care in 1994” when he was literally standing right behind her, now that’s a howler.
The type of things fact check sites check have more to do with staff quality. It’s like saying that an author is better than another author if there are fewer grammatical errors in his books. No, that says more about his editor and/or spell checker than the quality of his writing. Hillary Clinton has the best and most experienced people on her campaign. If you want to use THAT as a good metric for how she’ll do as President, there’s a case to be made for that, since a Presidency can succeed or fail on the quality of the people around the President. But let’s not call one candidate more honest than another because her fact checkers and scriptwriters are better at their jobs than Sanders’ or Kasich’s. Trump doesn’t even bother with that stuff, so it’s like comparing apples and oranges with him.
Maybe that’s a part of it, but that’s also a measurement of good judgment and analytical skills – smart and crafty candidates will have good staffs.
I wouldn’t call Hillary more honest than Bernie or Obama, necessarily, but I think she’s way more honest than Cruz and Trump, and from what I know of him, Kasich too.
Fact checking is part of my analysis – the rest is my own opinion and judgment. Yours may differ. Both of us may be influenced by bias.
I’d note that when you look at Clinton’s falsehoods, they are far from random. They just happen to be almost universally very beneficial to her campaign if they are believed by enough people. Which tells me that she and her staff knew they were false, but judged them worth saying anyway.
If you look at the false statements of other candidates, it’s pretty random stuff by comparison. Clinton’s, on the other hand, are all pretty explosive.
So your argument is that she’s smart enough to manage her message rather than just blurting out any old lie that passes through her head? By that metric I’d much rather have her as President than any of the blurters.
I don’t live in your country but if I did, I would read what you wrote as being best summarised as “vote for Clinton, she’s more competent”.
And your last sentence I read as “it’s not fair to judge Trump as not being good at baseball given that he doesn’t play baseball”.
I don’t accept that this is true without a lot of cites.
I don’t think anyone would argue that she’s not the most scripted and calculated of the candidates. If that’s what you’re looking for, she’s not only your first choice now, she should have been your first choice in 2008. Oddly enough, the public doesn’t rate such skills all that highly.
The cites are in the OP: Just to take the first few false statements:
“Sanders wants to delay implementing the Clean Power Plan”
“You are three times more likely to get a mortgage if you’re white than if you’re a minority”
“We have more jobs in solar than in oil”
“I’m the only candidate who has a plan to defeat ISIS”
“Every piece of legislation I ever introduced had a Republican co-sponsor”
These are all statements that are pretty advantageous to say, whether true or not. Not anywhere near the category of misquoting Truman harmlessly.
Kasich says lots of things that are supposed to help him politically too. All politicians do. That’s kind of an enormous part of politics.