Millions of people believe that dinosaurs and cavemen co-existed. Objective reality is not up for a vote.
That might be an easier position for you to counter. Unfortunately, that’s not mine. And your wish for debate is betrayed by rhetoric that says that the very reason for the Republican party’s existence is to lie. That is not an invitation for real debate, it’s biased nonsense.
Got it. So for you, those millions who don’t accept that Republicans are inveterate liars are deluded or dupes. Another warm invitation for reasoned debate.
Because it matters.
Because we have the singular duty to elect the most powerful human being on the face of the Earth. The stakes are too high, what may be a sad fib before the County Park Board is a lie in a Presidential election; absolutes are a figment, context is all. What is mere cheating in a game of penny ante poker is wholly different when you’re matching wits with a Cecilian, and death is on the line.
We fucked up, and somewhere north of a hundred thousand people were snuffed out, untold numbers rendered miserable. We picked the wrong guy, because we were told he was smart, and reasonable, and cautious. “Conservative”, I believe they called it. Were he running for County Commissioner, that would be mere campaign crapola. Running for President, makes it a lie.
Because it matters.
Read my first post. I thought Rand Rover’s OP took an illogical left turn, one I didn’t understand. It was a non sequitur from the prior thread. I take no exception with the notion that a statement deliberately designed to mislead is less than honest. Unlike many posters on this board, however, I detect such statements from both sides from time to time. And I tend not to wither from the shock.
Doesn’t make it less truthful, that’s my point in this instance. It seemed a given to most of the gang in the other thread.
Well, it wasn’t in the corner. But if it’s any consolation, it wasn’t a very good cigar and the homeless guy kept squirming. 
ETA: I lied about the cigar; it was very good (but that wasn’t as funny). I’m such a Republican.
I guess I just don’t see why it’s worth arguing over. As I said, it’s just as likely to be true as it is a lie. Flip a coin, but don’t go digging your heels in over it.
Yeah. You and me both.
We can help you fix that. We will help you fix that.
A lobotomy? (I kid, I kid!)
I guess personal responsibility and accountability are in the eye of the beholder. Seems sort of “situational” to me.
A lie is a lie, but there are nuances.
Saran Palin claimed to have refused federal funds for the so-called Bridge To Nowhere, and further claimed that Alaska could build its own bridge if it wanted one. Although I doubt that a small state like Alaska can build a massive bridge without help from the Interstate Highway system, I have no reason to doubt that she didn’t, literally speaking, refuse the money for that project.
But if she used the money for something else, as the Democrats claim, there’s a lie in there somewhere. It could well be the Democrats who are lying because it doesn’t seem necessarily unethical to reallocate federal funds, originally intended for one project, to another. And who in their right mind would expect a state to give back highway funds in any case?
Although I detest Palin and am, in fact, a Democrat, I think this whole question about the bridge is inconsequential, at least on its face. However, this year’s election has become so heated that we have reached a state of what I call embittered sensitivity. Either side will do what it can to discredit the other. For example, it’s absolutely normal for presidential candidates to make promises that they will never actually fulfill if elected, but these are usually understood as the candidate’s vision statement. But in the heat of discussion statements such as this may well be called lies as well.
Hmmm. Given that almost the entirety of the justification for her running for vice president with McCain is that she will be a maverick reformer opposed to things like earmarks, it seems a bit more than inconsequential when she says that she opposed the bridge to nowhere when she had in fact been very much in favor of it. Her opposition was not on principle, as their campaign would like people to believe, but rather very much due to the fact that the state would have to pony up half the dough. Since she went ahead and accepted money for, and continued building, the Access Road to the Nonexistent Bridge to Nowhere, the principle falls flat on its face. It’s actually quite consequential.
Not only that, but the consequences of shrugging off a campaign’s lies, or of picking them out individually to dismiss as inconsequential, are staring us right in the face. I think we ought to be keenly aware of the signficant consequences of things like this.
This “both sides do it” business is really very much false equivalence. It’s like saying “There’s no point in considering the relative fuel economy of a Prius and an Escalade. They both burn gas.”
I’m actually somewhat sympathetic to the OP, notwithstanding my comments in the pit thread. Personally, I prefer to reserve the word “Lie” for “Knowing untruth”.
Palin was a lying innovator. Usually when you’re called on a mis-statement, you walk it back. But I understand that she uttered her crowd-pleasing lie, “I told Congress, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ on that bridge to nowhere. If our state wanted a bridge, I said we’d build it ourselves.”, over 25 times after it was pointed out that she actually supported the bridge and never turned down funds for it.
Furthermore, she dropped that line when she campaigned in Alaska, then resuscitate it in the lower 48 later. This shows that she knows that she is not telling the truth.
So why does this innovation matter? Well, it sort of makes comparisons between the candidates tricky when they tell flat out lies and refuse to correct them. Nor is this a tangential comment: Palin as the clean government reformer is a central aspect of the McCain campaign.
Wow. You have just enunciated the broadest conception of the term “lie” we may have ever seen on these here boards, which is no mean feat. It looks like you are saying that the Bush campaign as a whole (i.e., not any particular statement Bush or anyone else made, but just the fact that Bush ran for president) was a lie. You seem to be saying that he misrepresented that he would be a good president and then was not, so his entire campaign (or, more broadly, just the fact that he ran for president) was a lie. That is unbelievable.
If Obama gets elected and does something you disagree with, I’m sure you will hurry in here with a similar pronouncement of how his campaign was also a lie.
Here’s another way to conceptualize what I’m saying.
What if I started a pit thread titled: “Obama the arsonist commits arson again!”
And the OP of that thread was about some speech Obama gave on economic policy that I disagree with, and I said the speech was essentially an act of arson.
You’d call me nuts, right? And you’d ask me to point to a single act of arson Obama committed during that speech or ever in his life.
Why is it any different if you subsititute “lie” for “arson”?
No, it’s a quite bit more nuanced than that. Bush very specifically claimed to be several things that he then went the opposite of. He claimed to be a uniter, not divider, and turned out to be one of the most polarizing and unilateral presidents in history. He claimed to be interested in the environment; his administration is so against admitting global warming that they refused to so much as open the EPA email containing a report referring to it this past spring. In every way, he presented himself as a moderate, when in fact he has turned out to be pretty extreme. I think most people, at least in 2000, thought they were voting for a moderate Republican, who would “restore honor and dignity in the White House,” which to me at least means some degree of transparency and certainly not petty vengeance on political enemies. Bush’s campaigns claimed a number of characteristics for him that were the diametric opposite of what he actually was, and had to have done so knowingly - I find it implausible that he had a complete change of heart in the middle of his term, even with 9/11, although that exacerbated all his worst characteristics. (I use he and his to refer to the entire administration, but I really mean Bush/Cheney.) This is not the usual “didn’t live up to his campaign promises” indignation. This is “turned out to be a completely different person from the one presented during the campaign” indignation.
The Republicans don’t exist in order to lie (Hentor misused the term raison d’etre), but these days they exist largely as a political force because of lies. I can’t say entirely because of lies, because the one thing you can count of a population for is to vote for people to lower taxes, and the Republicans are very good at that too.
Uh, the difference would be that Obama hasn’t commited arson?
Off to chain myself to a tree while petting baby seals and protesting nukes (which actually I support). 
Meanwhile you’re paring down to the narrowest definition of lie I’ve ever heard. As long as we can’t prove what was going on in the mind of the person making the statement, it’s not a lie? Makes it rather hard to prove that anyone was telling a lie, doesn’t it?
Uh, which is my point exactly? If someone says X lied and then offers no proof at all that X lied, they’ve done exactly the same thing as me saying Obama committed arson.
Well, I do understand that message board standards of proof are different than the standard used to convict someone in court. But very often the person charging someone with a lie doesn’t even broach the subject of whether the alleged liar knew what they were saying was false (as in the example thread).
All of what you wrote can be easily condensed into a simple statement by a real straight-shooter who just says… "the politician lied."