It means I couldn’t assume you were lying, yes. (About hearing about it, that is. Those bicycle seat rumors were vile lies, I can assure you. Lies!) Feel free to roll your eyes to your heart’s content. Honestly, it’s hard to believe this is such a difficult point to grasp.
And you believe this based on what? Your spider-sense?
Why? Because you demand them? What if they want to keep their mole unnamed, eh?
I won’t. But I’m a man of rare integrity.
Yeah, basically. He’s applying for a job from me, after all.
Then they either phrase it like I did, keeping it hypothetical, or they say “We’ve heard from our unnamed mole in the Obama campaign, who we’ve been able to place because his people are so lax in security, that…”
Sadly we can’t assume that candidates for President, or indeed the President himself, share your standards.
ETA: Come to think of it, the “unnamed mole” claim sort of brings us back to square one. I suppose it’s possible that McCain could provide proof of the existence of a mole without outing them-- nude pictures of Obama’s birthmark or the like. But it’s probably more sensible to run with the “hypothetical” approach.
True, he is. But an unwillingness to meet your demands is not the same as lying.
It was inelegantly phrased.
It’s a high hurdle though. I’m a living saint, really.
Well, the point is that it’s not unreasonable to assume the McCain camp is lying, even if we don’t know for sure one way or the other. They could trot out the source of the rumor, and he/she could be someone reasonably reliable, and we’d have to take a step back and say something like, “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. They were telling the truth!” But that seems unlikely at this point.
So, all other things being equal, it’s at least reasonable to be skeptical. Skepticism is reinforced because 1) the Republicans now have a long, proven history of misrepresentation in the public sphere, and 2) McCain’s campaign has been lying quite gratuitously about other issues, especially distorting Obama’s record and willfully misinterpreting his statements. In other words, our judgment is also based on past behavior.
This whole nitpick about lying vs. not-lying strikes me as a bit of a red-herring, anyway.
But I will concede, for what it’s worth, that no one can claim with 100% certainty that we know for a fact McCain’s campaign is lying. If I were write…
…well, then I’d be lying.
Isn’t it sort of elementary-school logic to say “I heard someone say X” as your defense? Honestly, your best defense of the McCain campaign is a little kid’s illogic? Well, if that’s how we’re going to do it, Obama calls dibs on the presidency!
Top that!
And Biden calls shotgun!
Sailboat
Defense of what? That’s what they asserted to begin with, it’s not their defense of anything.
Oh look, an entire thread consisting of arguing with a troll. Good job, guys.
-Joe
As a preemptive defense against being wrong.
In defense of McCain’s stupid claim that he would fire the head of the SEC. And their equally stupid rebuttal to criticism about that claim which equates firing with “requesting to resign”.
All I’m going to add to this is that I heard McCain was planning to lie about what he heard Barack Obama was going to say.
I understand why they lobbed that grenade at the Obama camp. But I took Sailboat’s post to mean McCain was defending the charge of lying by saying, “I heard it from someone.”
“I heard it from someone” isn’t his defense against anything, it’s what his camp claimed to begin with.
I demand that you tell me who you heard that from or risk being branded with a scarlet “L.” 
And divulge a source? NEVER!!
Librarian?
If The McCain campaign really has a mole inside the Obama campaign, I like MEBuckner’s idea of using it as a way to start feeding false leads to the McCain camp. Just keep feeding them crazier and crazier shit. There’s no downside.
Now that would be just silly!
However, I did HEAR that McCain’s team were lying. And since you cannot be 100% sure that I did not, you must give me the benefit of the doubt. Also, you have no right to ask me who I heard it from. You must just trust me. Therefore, by your own reasoning, they were both lying and not lying at the same time, and you will therefore disappear in a puff of logic.
(Also, when McCain’s team pinky swore that they “heard it”, I saw that their fingers were crossed, and therefore we’re all going to give them atomic wedgies after school.)
Lumberjack. But that’s OK.
Oh, fuck you. I’ve seen this dance far too often long before you showed up. You might agree with the OP, but you don’t want to acknowledge it, so you latch onto bullshit semantics. Your first post had nothing about saying McCain screwed up, just a kneejerk semantics defense.
I swear, if the news came out that McCain had kicked a dog and someone started a thread titled “McCain kicks puppy!” there’d be someone in there arguing that since the dog was two years old it wasn’t really a puppy any more, as if that made it okay.
That’s it. Off to the corner with you. Just sit there and think about what you’ve done.