All this being said, “ambiguously” is obviously the only real way to lie effectively. This is why trump lies ambiguously. He isn’t more honest than others. He is trying to get over with it as long as he can and damage the idea of truth as effectively as possible. In fact the other kinds of lying are not even close to the danger levels this person represents.
You want motive for him to try to damage the truth from the bully pulpit? (Or else “it’s just a leftie conspiracy” that he would attempt to?) It’s because he is desperately afraid of it in it’s many forms coming at him from many sides: Agencies of the government, journalistic outlets, every news network except one. He is hiding a lot. Seems like a good motive to me.
As has been said before, sometimes (well, often) his lies are both ginormous and self-demonstably, well, lies. “It didn’t rain during my inauguration speech”, “I drew a bigger crowd than Obama”, “I’ve put my company in a blind trust and this pile (of quite apparently blank paper in various unmarked folders) here are all the documents relative to that”, “No other President faced as much opposition”, “I have people in Hawaii investigating Obama and they can’t believe what they’re finding”, to say nothing of the dozens upon dozens of time he’s said “No, I never said that” when, motherfuck, there’s video of you saying exactly that. Often dated yesterday.
Spin and innuendo and disingenuousness is nothing new in politics, but Trump flies in the face of provable, objective reality more often than not.
I note that Starving Artist has not returned to the thread. Perhaps my conditions weren’t fair enough to him. Which kind of proves my fuckin’ point.
Why in the world did you think it was necessary to add “to accept the “perfectly clear to most people,” standard you propose” to that sentence? 
I didn’t propose the contest.
No bill has yet passed under Trump that has cut Medicare.
Nope, I merely said what I had to say. I’m not the least bit interested in foraging around ferreting out lies from the almost 30 years of Clinton national politics, lies which everyone here knows they tell and were happy to acknowledge during Hillary’s campaign against Obama. Hell, Rush Limbaugh was bashing Bill Clinton for lying all the time during the run up to the '92 election. IIRC, he paraphrased one of Clinton’s supporters (a radical left-wing professor unsurprisingly), who, when speaking of accusations regarding Clinton’s honesty, declared “Of course he can’t tell the truth, he’s running for president!” The underlying message of course being that such lies are necessary because to tell the truth would undermine his candidacy, and of course the presidency is far too important to be sacrificed on the altar of truthfulness.
Well, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and what we have now is a similar situation, where Trump’s supporters are continuing to support him despite his lies because they believe the significance of the things he will accomplish far outweigh whatever importance attaches to his lies.
What’s really amusing is the way the news media and the left in general have become so fixated on “fact-checking” and “lies” now that Trump and not Clinton or Barack “You can keep your doctor” Obama is in office.
Yet, you attempted to establish a bar to admittance of evidence if such a contest was held.
Occupational hazard?
Politifact kept track of every single campaign promise Obama made and whether he eventually kept, compromised or broke them.
They tracked Obama’s statement that they fact-checked and called them just like they do other politicians and Obama’s “Keep your Doctor” earned the “Lie of the Year” for 2013.
The House passed a bill that has yet to pass the Senate. Under the terms of the sort of careful and exacting semantic precision you demand when it suits your purposes, that bill was “passed”.
Trump has yet to reject the only bill that does exactly that despite what he promised during the campaign multiple times. In fact, he held a lawn party to celebrate it’s passing in the House of Representatives. You think he’s lulling the GOP into a false sense of security?
Actually I simply tried to nail down specifics of the proposed contest. I didn’t propose the “unambiguously” standard.
I think that until something happens, it’s not an unambiguous lie.
In an argument about what constitutes a lie this is the thinnest soup I’ve seen yet. It doesn’t even pretend to deserve a response.
Something is not “unambiguous” because it is in process. Those are two exclusive concepts.
And whether it passes or not is irrelevant.
How are you so bad at this?
No “passed” in that quote.
So you take him to have meant “I’m going to try but I already know it’s not going to pass.”?
His administration is trying to do something that he said he wouldn’t do. Lie.
If it’s a lie when a democrat does it, it’s a lie if a republicist does it too. On earth I mean.
The problem with this view is that there’s a dramatic level of difference between the lies. Sure, Obama lied, although the doctor statement was a future prediction and not a lie. But his lies were seldom, consistent with “normal political,” lies, and did not define him or his Presidency.
Trump’s lies come so frequently, about such inconsequential things, and seem so focused on self-aggrandizement that it’s simply a different milieu.
And yet there was a “passed” in the post that elucidator was replying to:
How are you so bad at this?
And the good news: Even if that crap does pass, Kellyanne Conway is adamant that the Medicare cuts are not Medicare cuts.