Hmm, I am not certain. However, when my father and I argued over the sanity of the second gulf war, I said something to the effect of:
“Look, if the two most likely outcomes of the war look suspiciously like the Vietnam war or Lebanon’s civil war, you simply don’t go to war unless your existence is at stake. You’d be stupid to do otherwise.”*
I’m not sure if that ended his support for W, but he didn’t praise him in my presence again.
Well, Hillary might get caught consuming live children. It’s a crazy world, and I wouldn’t rule anything out of the possible. That’d make me vote for Donald.
If she had the decency to humanely kill the toddlers and was skilled enough prepare them in the most delicious manner possible? That’d be a tough call. You’d have to be pretty inhumane to others before I’d think you’d rank lower in presidential qualifications than a pathological liar who can’t even own up to when he’s already been contradicted by publicly available facts. That’s not even the behavior of a strong dictator - that’s the behavior of the dictator’s toadie.
*And, we got an unholy mix of the two, which still hasn’t stopped.
Seriously, folks, how can you listen to Trump and NOT come to the conclusion that he’s the biggest liar in history? The bullshit he spews is obvious to anyone with a 6th-grade education who doesn’t delude themselves by either voting for him because Hillary or because it will bring closer the birth of a Fourth Reich. Try a little fact-checking yourself if you don’t believe me. And try to do something most conservatives appear incapable of: keep an open mind.
Clinton is a liar. She’s absolutely willing to lie, and has repeatedly over the course of her career. She’s one of the more dishonest candidates in the history of the country.
Now… you know those scalable videos of the size of objects in the universe?
I’ve just described, let’s say, Alpha Centauri B, a star slightly smaller than our sun but dwarfing all the planets of our solar system. That’s the size of Clinton’s dishonesty. She’s a liar of Alpha Centauri B dimension.
Betelgeuse is one of the largest stars we know. Its diameter is roughly that of the size of Jupiter’s orbit around the sun. It dwarfs Alpha Centauri B.
And that’s the Trump scale of lies. Clinton is at the dishonest end of the politician-lying spectrum. Trump is . . . well. . . HUUUGE. A different ball game. Clinton’s lies are plausible, calculated, and generally consistent with how politics are done in this country, although again on the far side of the slope. Trump’s lies are blatant, immediate, self-contradictory, and delivered with unselfconscious carelessness. Trump is the Betelgeuse of lying.
Really? I mean, she’s nothing great, but I wonder if you’ve been spoiled by Obama. I’d put her honesty up against her husband, or Reagan, or Nixon, or W, or our own dear Jesse Helms. Maybe Carter’s more honest than her.
Since I became aware of politics, I’ve realized that politicians didn’t get where they were through scrupulous honesty. I’m really unconvinced that Clinton is especially worse than others.
Hey look, there’s a blog entirely dedicated to pointing out Politifact’s supposed bias. And I’ve seen examples posted that do show clear examples of… well let’s call them inconsistencies. Usually it’s 2 different fact checkers making a different call on some ancillary statement from 2 different politicians, often times years apart, or giving different weights to the same lie.
And maybe they are biased; after years of calling bullshit on Republican politicians I imagine it’d be hard to give them the benefit of the doubt. But there are, of course, 2 big problems with this notion.
I don’t know how many ratings Politifact gives on a daily bases, but finding a few dozen or a few hundred questionable ones over a 9 year history doesn’t necessarily mean much, and
They don’t issue ratings in a vacuum, so you can read their rationale yourself and decide if that particular rating is justified. This is, of course, harder when they’re aggregating all ratings over a politician’s career, but still.
What’s happened, like with Snopes, is that there’s a large group of people who’ve just accepted that “Oh, fact-checkers are biased” and use that as an excuse not to read articles or think critically.
Trump lies about not saying things there are videos of him saying. Not things that happened years ago, but days or hours ago. How anyone could think they’re in the same ballpark is crazy to me.
If they simply got rid of that I’d probably love them. I seriously have never read an article that seemed to miss important aspects. They seem to hire good people. On the other hand, since they have this childish “Pants on Fire” outlet for their ire, perhaps this allows their articles to be more professional. Other media outlets have to work their virtue signaling and peer pressure in more traditional ways.
I’m not sure what you mean by “in terms of the content of the message,” but I see two very important differences here.
First, Sanders’s campaign cited a specific study to back up his claim. Trump refused to respond, leaving everyone (factcheckers, voters, etc.) to try to figure out what he’s talking about.
Second, and more importantly, Sanders was excluding people in school from his claim. Trump? Nobody knows for sure, but the best guess is that he’s calling full-time students “unemployed” in order to make his claim.
If that’s what Trump is doing, it makes sense to call his claim mostly false.
Sure, Clinton is a career politician. She colors the truth, fudges, exaggerates. They all do. But Clinton is far more truthful that Trump, and better, iirc that* every other GOP candidate.*
Bernie did beat her in truthfulness, I admit. However even he had his Pinocchio moments. But he is the ONLY one.
In defense of Trump, his cluelessness is such that he probably doesn’t realize that most of what he says is nonsense. You can’t say the same about Clinton.
Not that Trump is remotely honest. But I don’t think you can just stack up his accuracy stats against Clinton’s and use them as a proxy for their relative honesty (even leaving aside the bias of fact-checkers which has enormous impact).
“I am endorsing Hillary, and all her lies and all her empty promises,” O’Rourke continued. “It’s the second-worst thing that can happen to this country, but she’s way behind in second place. She’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”