Most of the public use wikileaks to validate the truth of politician’s statements these days.
While WikiLeaks has usually been nonpartisan in the past, it only leaked DNC information and not RNC information in 2016. Are you suggesting that only parties who get hacked should be scrutinized? Would you be singing a different tune if a treasure trove from the RNC but not the DNC had been leaked?
The next is that the lies you are so indignant about are either trivial in the extreme, or arguably not lies at all… the media showed aerial photos of the crowds two hours before the inauguration started and compared them to the highest density Obama crowd shots they could find
Mostly False. I assume there is at least one partisan somewhere in the world that did what you describe, but most media sources used photos taken “shortly before noon” in both inaugurations.
I also disagree that it’s a “trivial” lie. If Trump lies frequently and repeatedly about facts that are easy to check, why would you trust him with matters of greater importance?
Trump said three to five million people voted illegally in the last election. That’s a lie in the extreme.
The 3 million voter fraud cases is what he believed at the time, and based on the Project Veritas expose of the Democrat campaigners, they certainly tried to organise voter fraud on a massive scale. The only reason there is no evidence of massive voter fraud is that no-one is looking for it.
A random guy on the street could be forgiven for believing a hyperpartisan news story claiming that there were 3 million voter fraud cases. But The President Of The United States should have more evidence than “I saw it on Breitbart”! Would you be so quick to forgive if the president got a wildly wrong statistic from any random blogger on Huffington Post?
How can you possibly think conservative organizations aren’t looking hard for evidence of voter fraud, an issue they have been pushing for years? The issue is so important to conservatives that in a country of 300,000,000, Fox News is eager to report a “few” or “dozens” of confirmed voter fraud cases (to get into “hundreds” territory they have to shift to “suspected” or “alleged”).
Finally, while Sanders only mentioned a few lies, there are many long lists of Trump’s lies. When it comes to frequency of lying he’s in a category by himself. None of the other presidential candidates came close, except Ben Carson.
you must be aware that the Birther rumour was started by Hillary Clinton’s campaign team in 2008
Again, that’s false.
Even if it were true, it was Donald Trump who kept pushing the issue:
That’s the last in a long six-year-long series of birther tweets after the 2008 campaign ended. Even if the Clinton campaign (let alone Hillary herself) had ever supported birtherism (it didn’t), all that would have stopped when the campaign ended. Only Trump would keep repeating the rumor for six years.
Are you sure you are going after the right liar here?
The DNC clearly had a pro-Hillary bias, but Trump had always made far more numerous and more exaggerated false statements than the DNC or Clinton ever did. Moreover, the election is over. It wouldn’t make sense for Bernie to attack Hillary at this point, and since we’re stuck in a two-party system, it wouldn’t make sense to attack the DNC either, except to encourage it to behave differently in the future.
My advice is avoid crying Wolf over trivial inaccuracies, honest errors and defensible claims.
Honest errors and defensible claims are not what we’re talking about here. Meanwhile, things like crowd size may be “trivial” in the sense of being unimportant to public policy, but they are not trivial
- regarding the magnitude of the lie (1.5 million says Trump, versus expert estimates of 300,000 to 600,000 — roughly one third of Obama’s crowd size)
- regarding the issue’s importance to Trump himself (he thought the matter was important enough that he gave two speeches about it on the same day and make it the focal point of his press secretary’s very first press conference)
- regarding the effect on public discourse (Trump used this claim, like many others, as a way of attacking the media and sewing confusion.)
honest errors
Finally I really want to stress that it’s not acceptable for the POTUS to take any and all right-wing news and opinion pieces as gospel or to massively misstate or misrepresent statistics. Maybe that’s fine for Joe Sixpack. But it is seriously fucked up for the President to claim something is true just because anybody, anywhere, made an allegation.
It’s unfortunate that we don’t have a proper word for Trump. I think that rather than being a “liar”, he is “a guy that says anything that he would like to be true, without caring about whether or not it actually is true.” But there is no word for that, so I use “liar” as a shorthand notation. Feel free to suggest another term that better reflects Trump’s indifference toward the distinction between “true” and “false”.
P.S. For anyone trying to understand the psychology of Trump supporters, I enjoyed this piece:
We must also understand that they tend to read very different news sources, often actively avoiding news like CNN or New York Times, which right-wing sources have told them for years are left-wing.
