Would you consider that falsehood or hyperbole?
And would his intended audience make that distinction?
How do Utah citizens not die of embarassment from Orrin Hatch, possibly the lyingest congressperson?
I don’t think he believes it at all. However, by proposing it, and relying on the Republicans to automatically shout it down, he’s pretty effectively shown that the right is hypocritical in its “OMG WE NEED TO CUT CORNERS EVERYWHERE” plan. Teachers can stand a paycut, but don’t you dare touch anything our constituents like.
Nope, guys, give it up, Bricker found one, which totally and absolutely proves equivalence. In fact, since this is posted on a lefty-leaning board, it actually increases the lefty lie quotient by a marginal degree, thus making the lefty side more the liars than the right.
It reads to me like hyperbole on the part of Hatch, but I suppose that Hatch’s intended audience (or some of them, anyway) might believe he was making a literal claim.
The OP’s claim read to me as attempting a literal, not hyperbolic, claim about Hatch.
Returning our attention to the Pelosi chart for a moment, would you say there’s much chance of that having been seen as hyperbole?
I guess my point is that any way you slice it, Hatch’s claim, while not a model of either probity or clarity, is not worse than Pelosi’s claim by any reasonable barometer.
Here’s an example.
If someone were to say, “The Obamas are outrageous! Michelle Obama has more staff members than any other First Lady in the history of the United States!” then the claim is puffery, true or false. It’s clearly met to be hyperbole.
But if someone were to say, as Glen Beck once did, “Michelle Obama has 43 staff members, and Nancy Reagan had only three!” then we can’t really characterize it as hyperbole anymore, because of the use of such highly specific claims. It’s an outright falsehood.
(Mrs. Obama has 25 staff members, consistent with her immediate predecessors: Mrs. Bush had 26 at one point. Mrs. Clinton had 19. And Mrs. Reagan had 15. The numbers have grown throughout the years, reflecting an increase in the functions of the office of the First Lady).
So neither claim is admirable, but the first can be dismissed more readily than the second. Beck’s claim was a out-and-out lie.
As well as the factuality of a statement, don’t we need to consider the consequence of the lie? To take an utterly wild hypothetical example, suppose a civic leader were to advance lies in order to provoke a lemming stampede to a futile, destructive, and ruinously expensive war. Crazy, I know, but bear with me just for the sake of argument…
And then the question of persistence: how often is the lie repeated and what rhetorical mechanisms are deployed to support an ever shrinking credibility, what sub-lies, half-truths and misinterpretations are brought to bear in addition to simple falsehoods? Having dug a Grand Canyon of lies, can one simply staple it over with construction paper, or need one fill it back in, a spoonful of credibility at a time? Was the Republican leadership magically restored to parity when GeeDubya left office, or have they some penance yet to perform? Perhaps if the Democratic Party were to solemnly insist that Obama raises the dead and cures the leper as a re-election bid, they might reach a similar level of falsity, but not of consequence.
Well, I don’t know. Nixon was a pretty big liar. That fact did not seem to help Carter’s 1980 reelection bid.
If politics was about trust and credibility, neither party would probably deserve to win.
It was* not *hyperbole. As a gener rule, I follow “never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidty”.
But when we are talking about politicians, there is a sleaze X factor to consider.
Ah leave Mr Hatch alone, He’s got important stuff to do like attach anti-abortion measures to the Korean free trade deal.
Really he’s gone with his next election anyhow, Bennet wasn’t conservative enough for Utah you think Hatch really stands a chance. He’s going to do and say anything to keep himself in power and it won’t be enough, listening to him at this point is a waste of time.
I don’t know that Orrin is especially remarkable for lying, but he’s quite the sleazebag otherwise. I brought this up in another recent Pit thread targeting Hatch - he’s probably the biggest lapdog of the “nutritional supplement” industry in the history of Congress, and it can be argued that thanks to Orrin, the supplement industry is free to tell lies about what their products do.
Sorry, both are examples of falsehoods. Specific numbers need not be provided.
Would you also argue that if someone claimed that “President X pardoned more criminals than any other President in history”, it wouldn’t be a falsehood if precise numbers weren’t supplied, that it would just constitute “puffery”?
What bullshit.
Well, he’s certainly one of the 100 lyingest senators right now.
To be fair, Hatch is being pushed to the right by the tea party. Did you see what happened to Bennett? Well, he doesn’t want that to happen to him and being vitriolic and hyperbolic is the road to his job security.
I’ve seen Grassley jerk to the right after getting smacked around for trying to be reasonable during the health care negotiations with Baucus and now he has adopted vitriolic partisanship. I see it up and down the Republican party.
The Democrats won’t stand up to the Republicans and the Republicans won’t stand up to the tea party… so guess who is controlling the debate?
You don’t need to buy new to get depreciation deductions.
oil depreciation is called depletion.
Accelerating depreciation is a timing issue but to the extent that money has time value (and considering we pay so much in interest it seems like it does for us), decelerating some of the acceleration of deductions we have had recently might be useful.
What do you know about Scientology?
Would you like to know more?
The issue isn’t really “who’s Mormon?!?” With Udall, the relevant comparison is that he was a representative from Colorado. Coloradans voted him in, he represented them, and AFAIK he didn’t do anything outrageous as a result. Colorado isn’t culturally dominated by Mormons or any other religious group AFAIK- maybe demographic considerations aside, Coloradans are simply cooler overall?
Orrin Hatch OTOH seems to me to be cranking out lie after lie. It got to a point I had to ask, “what is the major malfunction here?” Well, he’s representing Utah. I never had a problem with Utah before, but lately their representative is pissing me off with his relentless lies (it isn’t like the Democrats are beyond reproach. I really wish he’d produce some honest criticism instead of lies). Utah is the citadel of Mormonism, and on closer inspection there does seem to be a sort of coercive Mormon Culture of Lies. So maybe that’s at the root of it.
I don’t even know if Hatch is Mormon or not. It doesn’t matter. ISTM that to represent that population, one would have to humor a pretty significant portion of the Mormon Culture of Lies, if not the whole thing. My hypothesis is that this is the explanation for Hatch’s behavior as a lie machine: he represents a bunch of people who are living a lie.
Not that the Mormons I know aren’t nice. They don’t smoke or drink which is refreshing, they work hard and so on. Obviously one must choose conversation topics carefully with them… anyway, my impression is that there is an entirely different scenario in play in Utah where the Mormon Church is so influential.
From here:
Compared to the $14+ trillion debt, I agree a tax on jet owners doesn’t seem like it is going to pull us through by itself. But the point is it closes a loophole on the owners. I don’t know all the details, but it is hard to believe any non-draconian tax on jet owners would dissuade enough of them from jet ownership such that it would have much effect on the union workers at your plant. But you’re closer to it than I am- are people really worried about it?
If you wanted to be a funny guy, you’d call it, “In No Particular Order, the 100 Lyingest Senators.” 
Dammit, I said I didn’t want arguments in the form of ‘It depends on what the meaning of is is’! :mad: You’re parsing the meaning of ‘lie’ with your lawyerly tools, darn you to heck.
But anyway, as Mark Twain said, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” By Twain’s measure Pelosi is solidly in the 3rd circle of lies, while Hatch’s purely textual lying merely place him in the 2nd.
Then again, one could take the position that, clerical error aside, Pelosi’s numbers actually are accurate and acceptable. Are there more meaningful ways to present financial data? That’s for the sophists to decide. I should mention that I can picture you taking either side of this argument under different circumstances.
And then there is the question of what did the various presidents inherit? Reagan inherited Carter, which IMHO was a bedrock layer of sense with a structure of crappy results built on top. Reagan went nuts with the Republican agenda whatever else you want to say about him.
GHW inherited Reagan. Expectations were high, a lot of people liked Reagan. HW IMHO did a professional and competent job, criticisms aside. He did have a hard-on for “Read My Lips: No New Taxes”, but you’ll be surprised to learn he was *lying *when he said that!
Clinton inherited GHW. Certainly could have been worse, but now it was time for a [del]liberal[/del] what-was-Clinton-anyway? to run with the ball. His inheritance wasn’t an enormous pile of crap, and Clinton was pretty savvy (even though he lied about getting your dick sucked != sex), and pretty much everyone agrees he was good for the economy.
Bush inherited Clinton. Had Obama come in at this point, we would currently be riding around in flying cars that produce fusion power via your own farts. Instead, we got W
Obama inherited that. See where I’m going?
But lest you start to think I don’t like you, let me humor you at the last. Say Pelosi is another big fat liar (can you produce 4 examples of Pelosi’s lying, to establish a pattern?). By the logic of this thread, we would need to investigate what is the major malfunction with her constituency such that she is so weasely with statistics.
Sadly, no. He attributed it to Disraeli, but there is considerable doubt about that as well, many scholars preferring a colorless English lord otherwise unworthy of mention, Sir Reginald Dillweed. Or some such.