Sunday, January 10, 2016

Calling opponents liars, the theme of 2015 campaigns

One of the recently emerging themes of the current political season is calling opponents liars. It is beginning to look like an elementary school yard brawl. How does a rational voter sort this out?
Here is the danger.  The dedicated partisans of one side often believe their favorite candidate’s lies are true, even if facts reveal otherwise.  Worse is how those lies are used.  If it is used to make people hate others more to gain their support, Trump is guilty of that. Clinton is more guilty of self-aggrandizement, guilt avoidance, and factual inaccuracies in making a case for a specific government program.
Tapping fact checkers is one way to see who is the  bigger liar. Partisans of the Trump wing usually dismiss fact checkers as main stream media as a way of avoiding arguing the facts.   PolitiFact is a project of the Tampa Bay Times and uses a “Truth-O-Meter”. Glen Kessler of the Washington Post awards Pinocchios, the worst lies deserving four of them. FactCheck.org is not part of the mainstream media. It is a project of the Annenberg Foundation.   What is interesting is to compare them with those from those usually right wing leaning, including the New York Post or Breitbart.
PolitiFact awards the Liar of the Year to Donald Trump. “PolitiFact has been documenting Trump’s statements on our Truth-O-Meter, where we’ve rated 76 percent of them Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire, out of 77 statements checked. No other politician has as many statements rated so far down on the dial.…. But it was hard to single one out from the others. So we have rolled them into one big trophy.”
The Washington Post Fact Checker  gives  Trump  their  liar award, too. They concluded “ In the space of just six months, he earned 11 Four-Pinocchio ratings, far more than any other candidate.”
FactCheck.org names Donald Trump the “King of Whoppers”.
 Trump frequently makes false claims or claims without proof to gin up hate of others. Mentioned as Trump whoppers by at least one, if not more, are Trump’s “Thousands and Thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the 9/11 attack, that Mexican government sending immigrants that are criminals and rapists to the US, and that “Whites killed by Whites, are 16%; whites killed by blacks are 81%” when the reverse is true. Another falsehood is that Christian refugees cannot come into this country, while Muslims can come easily”.
Hillary Clinton gets criticized by saying she tried to join the marines once, but the NY Post says that is a lie and Washington Post  gave her 2 Pinocchios. The NY Post claims Clinton knew the Ben Ghazi attack was caused by jihadists from the beginning. The Washington Post gave her two Pinocchios for her Congressional testimony on Benghazi and three on some of her email server statements. Fact Check.org said she was mistaken when she claimed drug prices had doubled and that cost shifting accounted for higher premiums.  Was she dead broke when she left the White House? NY Post says her net worth was $101 million. Did she come under sniper fire in Bosnia? Clearly not true per videos of the time.

 A version of this was published in the www.skyhidailynews.com  1/15/16

http://www.breitbart.com/hillary-clinton/

http://m.dailykos.com/story/2016/2/8/1478776/-Why-Do-People-Hate-Hillary-Clinton-So-Much

 http://www.dailynewsbin.com/news/fact-checkers-confirm-hillary-clinton-is-three-times-more-honest-than-donald-trump/24676/



Posted by at
Labels: ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)