All purpose news and politics thread part v: The quickening

[Theleviathan]

I can't speak for thirty, but my point isn't making excuses for ****-heel Republicans--I think both parties are abysmal and personally hate both of them--but to challenge the ridiculous assertion that flat-out lying one out of every four things a person talks about isn't habitual lying. Anyone claiming that it isn't habitual is just being willfully ignorant and letting their party loyalty blind them in a really glaringly obvious (and sad) way.

I find it impossible to believe that if any of you knew a person in real life who lies 24% of everything he says, that you wouldn't call him a habitual liar (or something much worse, really.) That's a monumental amount of lies. The fact that this is even being debated is stunning to me, and in any other context we'd all be in complete agreement, but because the subject is the Democrats, suddenly it's okay to lie constantly. Alrighty then.

Depends what you count as lying. By use of hyperbole, exaggeration, and editorial ad-libs....I'd say we all dabble in lying 10-20% of the time.

I'm an independent, I have no loyalty. I just accept that politics comes with a degree of truth stretching or lying.
Always has, always will. Are some Dem lies frustrating? Absolutely. But to compare them to the orchestrated campaigns of misinformation by the right wing is ridiculous. Republicans of even 20 years ago were similar to Dems, but post-Newt it has been a steady degrading to another level of falsehoods. What Mets was trying to do, and you are providing cover for, is whataboutism from the severity of Republican truth desecration. That isnt justified.

[JackDaw]

For real.

That said, let's say it's "Average..."

Why are we even taking a party to task that tells around two lies to the one of a "Average..." party? If I'm not supposed to even take note of a quarter of what someone says being lies, what's the bit whoop with a little over fifty percent being lies?

It's only about double what an "Average..." person lies(which is seemingly fine...)

Of course, I think 99 percent of us (certainly including me) accept that in recent years prominent American Republican politicians have told an extraordinary number of lies...and if I was American I’d certainly vote Democrat, one reason being they fib less.

But 24% fib rate is average for a normal person, a non politician??

I think in everyday life I would distrust the statements of any one who lied that frequently. Apart from anything else it seems an unintelligent thing to do...if anybody is that unreliable it’s automatic to routinely double check anything they say on any important issue.

[Kirby101]

I don't have time to get into the weeds, but the nature of the lies is important. Are they exagerations as opposed to outright falsehoods?
Is going to War over WMD lies the same as a small minority could not keep their health plan?

[JackDaw]

I don't have time to get into the weeds, but the nature of the lies is important. Are they exagerations as opposed to outright falsehoods?
Is going to War over WMD lies the same as a small minority could not keep their health plan?

Yes...and the motive behind the lies is arguably critical..as well.

My best friend when growing up was a fantastic liar...but it was nearly always done to entertain and amuse...almost never to benefit himself.

[Mister Mets]

No -- I'd say he's someone who lies about 24% of the time, which is the truth.

That also means he's not making blatantly "false" statements 76% of the time, which would make him more trustworthy than not.

Conversely, you have Republicans making blatantly false statements (lying) more than half the time at 56%.

That's who I wouldn't trust.

That said -- using your logic, I'm sure you don't trust anything the Republicans have to say.

I think you misunderstood what Politifact was doing.

They're not measuring what percentage of statements politicians make are untrue. Politicians are often going to say some stuff that no one is really arguing about that isn't going to interest fact-checkers and isn't going to be part of any measurement.

Politifact only looks at claims that have gotten a particular type of publicity. They're not comparing the relative honesty of politicians in similar situations (IE- measuring the accuracy of every single claim by Republican and Democratic guests of Meet the Press.)

Although by the Politifact metric, Democrats have changed since the days of the original study, and are lying in half of observed statements now. The point that no one has responded to, but that no one has disputed is that of 22 statements made in December by democratic candidates or officeholders, half (11) were in the category of mostly false, false, or pants on fire. Two were partly true. Nine were true or mostly true. If this is a metric for measuring honesty, the party has gotten worse. This was based on a generous interpretation that counts Bloomberg as a Democrat (his statement was accurate) and excludes liberal-leaning viral posts.

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/

In the last few days, Bernie Sanders has falsely said he is the only candidate in the Democratic primary to have voted against all of Trump's defense budgets. Ro Khanna has falsely said his congressional district has a higher GDP than Russia, Andrew Yang was wrong about whether a face bask ban in Hong Kong was currently active, Nancy Pelosi falsely claimed 200K “will be prohibited from voting” in Wisconsin as a result of voter purges, Joe Biden was wrong about Delaware having the "eighth-largest black population in the country," Ilhan Omar claimed that the U.S. spends "57 cents on the dollar on defense" and more.

It is also worth noting that a Washington Post study at the same time as the Politifact analysis determined Democrats were worse by some metrics.

https://cmpa.gmu.edu/study-fact-chec...who-lies-most/

But 61% of Democratic statements also received three or four Pinocchios (the least truthful categories), compared to 48% of Republican statements.

I don't trust anything politicians say. This would be why I rarely use them as sources.

[Mister Mets]

Again...

If you had a neighbor who slashed you tires right in front of you every fourth day, you would rightly say "This neighbor is a hassle. He routinely slashes my tires right in front of me."

That reality would not change if you had another neighbor who was throwing a brick through your window three out of every four days.

Going with your tire slashing metaphor, if two neighbors routinely slash tires, and one does it more often than the other, they both have a tire-slashing problem. Any decisions you have to make about which one should be on a community board are probably going to be based on other factors.

No one knows anyone who is completely honest 100% of the time because doing so is not possible.
Taking that into account, lying 24% isn't bad.
It seems some of you are trying to make the perfect the enemy of the good here.

Lying is either an acceptable tactic or not.

If it's acceptable then it doesn't matter how often someone does it.

If it's not acceptable, it shouldn't happen with 24% of fact-checks (50% in the last month.)

Nope, but I saved it on an old hard drive maybe I'll upload it (if I get the time). If I do I bet CNN will yank it down for copyright infringement and have my Youtube account (which is tied to my main Google Account I use in real life) suspended. No offense Mets but I'm not sure I should take such a risk just to "prove" something to you (or anyone else for that matter).

Edit - I was simply telling a personal experience that impacted my life not trying to make any sort of point beyond that.

It just seemed like something that would get a lot of coverage (Wolf Blitzer admitting during the Republican South Carolina 2016 primary, that the media had entered into an agreement with the Bush Family to never "relitigate" the lies of the Iraq War so the country "could heal") and I couldn't find anything with a Google search.

I do completely understand that one person may be really bothered by a statement that doesn't get a lot of wider coverage.

By Politifact's measurables, they're putting it that Republicans lie at a rate two and a half times the Democrats...

But when you look at "Pants on Fire" stats... it's far, far worse. It's like 10X. It's almost like the GOP are gaslighting the country, or something.

The George Mason University study doesn't distinguish between Pants on Fire and False.

[SquirrelMan]

This "politicians should always tell the truth or nothing matters" is some purity bullshit. I'd also like to remind you that fact checkers called Democratic candidates on supposed "half truths" because they regarded things as facts that were still being investigated at the time (I'll try to find what I am talking about, a little misty on the details - but I remember getting angry over it after one debate).

Anyone who is still "both siding" American politics is not doing enough to stop fascism. Full stop.

[jetengine]

"Some democrats tell lies"
"The republicans literally make up crowd numbers and gun based massacres but defend it by literally saying they lie"

[aja_christopher]

Going with your tire slashing metaphor, if two neighbors routinely slash tires, and one does it more often than the other, they both have a tire-slashing problem. Any decisions you have to make about which one should be on a community board are probably going to be based on other factors.

24% is not routine, no matter how much you claim it is.

And you have yet to provide evidence that Republican policies (on tax cuts, deficits, health care, voter suppression, etc) benefit "the most people".

[Kirby101]

What are the policies based on the lies? Are the Dems basing an agenda on lies the way the GOP does?

[Mister Mets]

*sigh*



Which would be AWESOME! Except you and I BOTH know that the only people who benefit from Republican tax breaks are the super wealthy, who then hoard it in offshore accounts or spend it on luxuries rather than actually putting the money back into the economy. You want people to have more money to spend as they please? Tax the super wealthy at the rate they were taxed before Republicans stripped all of those taxes away to appease their primary donor class. Get that money back into the actual economy, not trading hands back and forth at auction houses, or traded amongst ‘friends’ on ridiculous luxuries, or on buying politicians, or on the stock market where it all becomes make believe money that only enriches the few.

The middle class benefited from the tax cuts.

Curiously, there are many people who received a tax cut who didn't realize they got it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/b...e-tax-cut.html

As the Times reported...

To a large degree, the gap between perception and reality on the tax cuts appears to flow from a sustained — and misleading — effort by liberal opponents of the law to brand it as a broad middle-class tax increase.

That effort began in the fall of 2017, when Republicans prepared to introduce legislation that models by the independent Tax Policy Center predicted could raise taxes on nearly a third of middle-class taxpayers. It continued through Mr. Trump’s signing of the law, even though the group’s models showed that the revised bill would raise taxes on relatively few in the middle class in the 2018 tax year.

Tax Cuts by the Numbers
Experts are divided on whether the tax law was a good idea. But there is little disagreement on this core point: Most people got a tax cut.

The Tax Policy Center estimates that 65 percent of people paid less under the law and that just 6 percent paid more. (The rest saw little change to their taxes.)

If you aren’t a fan of record deficits, then why do you continue to support the party whose policies have given us every major record deficit in living memory? War without end, payoffs to rich donors, zero regulations on banks or the investor class, wage and benefits cuts across all sectors to enrich the boss who does nothing for the economy at the expense of the worker who can no longer take part in the economy, all causing EVERY record deficit in my lifetime, and likely before as well.

The national debt consistently went up under Obama, so caring about the debt wouldn't mean I should support Democrats. They've failed to curb spending as well.

https://www.thebalance.com/national-...events-3306287

The costs ARE prohibitive to switch from the toxic fossil fuel addiction we have been stuck in for so long, you’re right.

PROHIBITIVE TO THE PEOPLE WHO DEAL IN POISONING THE PLANET. So who gives a CRAP if Exxon/Mobil goes bankrupt and their investors and CEOS go broke?! “Oh no! How sad! They can’t actively strangle the planet to death anymore while making disgusting amounts of money! How sad!”

Meanwhile, the long term returns on investing in NEW, non-planet-killing energy sources are fantastic! Your kids get to have a future, for one. But if that isn’t enough for you, Investing in and supporting new energy sources means new jobs and a new basis for our economy that can be regulated from the start to ensure that it doesn’t benefit terrorist enabling nations like Saudi Arabia or greedy shitbags like Dick Cheney over everyone else who has to live on the planet, too. In the short term, yes, fossil fuel reliant industry will face high costs, and that might mean that their investors and CEOs will have to sell one of their five houses or hold off on buying a twelfth Aston Martin, but they’ll live. Especially if we make sure we put regulations back in place that protect their workers and enforce things like ‘safety standards’ and ‘job security’ and ‘living wages for workers’...

I'm not talking about Exxon Mobil. I'm talking about ordinary people maintaining their standard of living when they no longer have access to cheap energy.

Meanwhile, Republicans purge voter rolls routinely, shut down voting centers in ‘urban’ neighborhoods, add hurdles to the voting process that adversely affect the poor far more than they affect the wealthy, oppose any sort of attempt at making Voting Day a national holiday with easy access to secure, easy-to-use, uniform voting systems. Republicans instead keep pushing for digital voting machines owned and operated by Republican donors and hackable with barely any effort and zero accountability. Republicans keep gerrymandering their districts to make sure that they never lose their money flow, and resist every attempt at creating non partisan districts based on population SIZE instead of population ‘loyalty’.

But yeah, ‘exaggeration’ is just as bad as all of that.

There's a lot of points here, but one I'll focus on is the idea of Election Day as a national holiday.

The first question is whether it's worthwhile to have one less day of productivity so that people can do something that usually takes about an hour, and that a good chunk of them do anyway.

But the majority of elections are not determined on election day. In most congressional districts, and maybe even most Senate races, the truly competitive race is the primary.

If the goal is to make it easier to vote only when it's Republicans VS Democrats rather than when it actually matters for who will represent people in Congress and even the White House when it's clear which party will win, it suggests that it's all about perceived partisan advantage rather than increasing meaningful participation.

As for foreign interference, I think you are probably right. We should just ignore all the evidence that Russia is, and has been, engaged in destabilizing nations they despise (not just us) with propaganda, social media manipulation, and outright bribery and assassinations. By acknowledging these things and trying to put a stop to them, we only gives Russia what they REALLY want, which is just attention, not the complete destabilization and corruption or destruction of longtime enemy nations through undermining their citizens faith in their governments, the functionality of said governments, and the creation of a massively divided electorate in those nations. There’s no way that strategy would work better than the old threat of nuclear war that got them nowhere...

What could possibly go wrong?

The investigations are fine and necessary, but every exaggeration helps the head of a country with a GDP just between Canada and South Korea (and just below Texas) appear to be a much more significant figure.

The foreign interference comments are more in a US context, so we haven't demonstrated significant bribery or any assassinations of American officials by Putin. Obviously, there are different issues in Europe.

In a free country, it is difficult to deal with propaganda and social media manipulation. I'm eager to hear any workable solutions.

The main thing that could be done is to punish Russia, by doing something to wreck the Russian economy (IE- denying Russian banks access to the dollar clearing system) although that could hurt the rest of the world, and it could interfere with a legitimate foreign policy goal of having Russia expend more resources in the quagmire of the Middle East as the US withdraws.

[aja_christopher]

The middle class benefited from the tax cuts.

It's a temporary bump, and just like with Bush who did exactly the same before the Great Recession, it will eventually come due.

https://www.npr.org/2019/12/20/78954...-gops-promises

And that still doesn't justify Republicans lying about them paying for themselves -- they did so because they know we have to pay one way or another.

In a free country, it is difficult to deal with propaganda and social media manipulation. I'm eager to hear any workable solutions.

Try not supporting a party that defends a candidate who openly solicits foreign interference in our elections for a start.

From the Mueller report to the Ukraine impeachment, Republicans (via Barr) are aiding and defending said interference, not attempting to "solve" it.

The national debt consistently went up under Obama, so caring about the debt wouldn't mean I should support Democrats. They've failed to curb spending as well.

Not to record levels -- the two parties are not comparable in that respect to anyone with any sense of logic.

And that still doesn't excuse the lies told by Republicans regarding how the deficit only matters when Democrats are in office.

It's impossible to have a serious discussion with you on these issues because of statements like the above.

They only confirm that Republicans will say anything to justify the unethical and fiscally irresponsible behavior of their party.

----
"(President Ronald) Reagan took the deficit from 70 billion to 175 billion." This is more or less accurate. The federal deficit went from about $78.9 billion at the beginning of Reagan’s presidency to $152.6 billion at the end of it. At points between 1983 and 1986, the deficit was actually more than $175 billion.

"(George H.W.) Bush 41 took it to 300 billion." Close, but not exactly. The number was around $255 billion at the end of Bush’s term. The deficit spiked at around $290.3 billion the year before he left office.

"(Bill) Clinton got it to zero." This is true. During his presidency, Clinton managed to zero out the deficit and end his term with a $128.2 billion surplus.

"(George W.) Bush 43 took it from 0 to 1.2 trillion." This is in the ballpark. Ignoring the fact that he actually started his presidency with a surplus, Bush left office in 2009 with a federal deficit of roughly $1.41 trillion.

"(Barack) Obama halved it to 600 billion." This is essentially accurate. Obama left the presidency with a deficit of approximately $584.6 billion, which is more than halving $1.41 trillion. The deficit was even lower in 2015 at around $441.9 billion."

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...ibute-deficit/

"The US budget deficit ballooned to nearly $1 trillion for the 2019 fiscal year, according to data released by the Treasury Department on Friday, the biggest gap since 2012 -- despite President Donald Trump's promises to shrink or even eliminate it. The deficit, which is the gap between how much the government spends and how much it takes in, grew 26% to $984 billion for the 12-month period ending in September, driven in part by the Republican tax cut package passed in late 2017.

The Trump administration narrowly averted crossing the $1 trillion threshold this year thanks to $70 billion in tariffs Trump has imposed on goods coming in from China and other countries. But the deficit is projected to top $1 trillion in 2020 as signs of Trump's trade war begins to weigh on the US economy and global growth slows.

The last time the gap was as big was in 2012, in the aftermath of the financial crisis."

https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/25/polit...019/index.html

[aja_christopher]

What are the policies based on the lies? Are the Dems basing an agenda on lies the way the GOP does?

No, they base it mostly on the truth, which is why they don't claim climate change is a hoax, that tax cuts will pay for themselves, that deficits only matter when Democrats are in power, that "voter fraud" justifies closing polling stations in black neighborhoods, and that an immigrant "invasion" justifies separating children from their mothers as a "deterrent".

We're talking about the same Mets who claims Democrats want "open borders" -- who selectively chooses not to credit Obama with presiding over a period of decreased immigration while simultaneously trying to claim that he was "routinely dishonest", which is the statement that started this discussion.

Basing their agenda on lies is standard procedure for the Republican party.

[shooshoomanjoe]

Obama added to the deficit to help Americans after a Republican president ruined the economy. trump added to the deficit to help out the rich.

[aja_christopher]

Obama added to the deficit to help Americans after a Republican president ruined the economy. trump added to the deficit to help out the rich.

"(George W.) Bush 43 took it from 0 to 1.2 trillion." This is in the ballpark. Ignoring the fact that he actually started his presidency with a surplus, Bush left office in 2009 with a federal deficit of roughly $1.41 trillion.

"(Barack) Obama halved it to 600 billion." This is essentially accurate. Obama left the presidency with a deficit of approximately $584.6 billion, which is more than halving $1.41 trillion. The deficit was even lower in 2015 at around $441.9 billion."

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...ibute-deficit/