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Lies: Big and Small
It’s well beyond whether or not [climate change] affects me personally, which it does, and it did my family, and still does. Just like your families. This is personal. Every one of you probably have a story that can talk about what’s happened to something you care greatly about, whether it’s a species or it’s your son or daughter coming down with cancer because of this.
— Joe Biden, 2019
President Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true. He exaggerates, boasts, and is sloppy with words. It seems to me that he lies in the service of ego and self-aggrandizement, as one might expect of a blowhard celebrity mogul.
In contrast, Mr. Biden is lying, here blaming cancer on climate change, for a much more consequential motive: he wants to impose draconian controls on our lives in the name of saving the planet. He, along with all the other green new dealers, wants to bleed the country poor as we dial back our standard of living in what (even the climate people would confess) is a pointless exercise in CO2 reduction, given that the newly developing nations of India and China are rapidly increasing their own CO2 emissions and will far outstrip ours.
It’s an exercise in self-inflicted impoverishment, but then, that’s pretty much the Democratic party platform these days.
Whether it’s blaming every warm day and personal health tragedy on carbon emissions, or promising that you can keep your health care while we know full well you can’t, or pretending that the nation is seething with ancient racial grievances, the left’s lies are big, and intended to fool us into embracing big changes that will make the state ever larger and more powerful.
I wish President Trump wouldn’t lie about the size of his audience or his skill as an amateur meteorologist. I wish he were a bit of a Boy Scout. But I prefer this stupid trivial ego-boosting stuff to the left’s efforts to take over my life under false pretenses.
Trump 2020.
Published in Elections
I saw the video of Biden saying that. He says his asthma was caused by growing up near a petrochemical plant. In his mind he chooses to equate some chemical exposure 70 years ago with CO2 levels today. He’s a jerk that will say anything to win approval.
Trump uses a lot of hyperbole. That is a style of talking that conveys emotion and is not lying. It is a form a speaking, like sarcasm, where the message is more than the words. Remember, we are living in a time that “literally” does not “literally” and anyone who claims someone is lying by ignoring the intended meaning is themselves being disingenuous.
It’s one thing to mistakenly worry about a hypothetical dire future but to claim injury from an entirely fictional completely non-existent current catastrophe is certifiable.
The dialogue within the left is utterly batsh*t crazy. They are gaslighting each other. How many fingers am I holding up, Winston? Which fingers are missing because of climate change?
I don’t like tossing the word “lying” about too casually. But I also don’t want to get into the business of parsing the President’s misstatements and declaring that some are “false but honest,” or something to that effect. I get what he’s doing: he’s a promoter, and that’s how he talks, painting a big pictures that’s mostly true — or that could be mostly true, if people would buy into it and help make it happen. I understand that and I don’t mind it. But I won’t call it honest, exactly.
Come on. Be better than this.
I’ll blame the bourbon.
But, come on: we all know he does it. Probably not that time (and I’ve already written about that at length), but often enough.
Henry, you nailed it. We worry less about our guy’s lies than their guys’ because of differential diagnosis. The same symptoms, the fever, diarrhea, and vomiting, can be caused by two different diseases, one much more virulent and much more rapidly fatal than the other.
Look, Biden is not lying. Democrats can’t lie. They may be mistaken, misspoke or not heard correctly. For an item to be a lie requires the media to say it is a lie.
Weighing, categorizing, evaluating & judging the causes, relative merits and demerits, motivations and effects of Trump’s and the democrats lies is way too much for me. I don’t have the time , the intelligence, or the fine discernment.
This is what climate change looks like ……
That’s why I’m here, Kent.
EDIT: Never mind. Not worth it.
Let’s face it – Trump likes to exaggerate much they same way products advertise “Best at fighting stains!” or “Whitens teeth in as little a ten applications!” While technically they are lying, better words are “exaggerating” or “inflating” when it comes to their claims.
What does get tiresome is when the press makes every exaggeration or innocently erroneous statement by Trump into “Another massive lie!”
100%
I think of what President Trump does as “promoter speech.” You can get yourself tied into knots trying to defend everything he says as literal truth: it can be exhausting, and it also leaves us open to charges of hypocrisy when we refuse to be as apologetic for more significant dishonesty from the left.
That’s the whole point of starting with an admission against interest: yes, Trump exaggerates and shamelessly self-promotes. But it’s small beer, in that the motive is petty and inconsequential.
But I repeat myself.
“Shameless.” That seems an apt word for this man. In a better world, that would be a bad thing. But we have had good men bowing meekly to a bullying press and political climate for too long, people afraid to offend the hyper-sensitive, too quick to shrink from the left’s damning labels. So if “shameless” falls short of being a badge of honor, it is at least a useful feature in an era of guilt-by-leftist-decree.
I couldn’t agree more. For me and you, “shameless” would be a flaw. With Trump, it’s a feature . . .
Update: I think this may be something the never-Trumpers don’t get. In a normal world, Trump’s behavior would be way out of place. In politics (not a normal world), his behavior is necessary for survival. Being shameless gives Trump cover, because he knows he can’t count on anyone else but himself and his family for support in the political arena. His voters however, will continue to back him because he is making a genuine effort to follow though with his promises.
Biden pulls this crap all the time and I don’t think it’s going to do him any favors in the long run. He’s got a phony anecdote for everything. Suzie in Idaho cannot afford to feed her six kids because of low minimum wage. Climate change destroyed George in Wisconsin’s cornfield. Bright little Nicky in Macon, Georgia will grow up to cure cancer someday, but only if he can live to afford his insulin.
We all know Trump is a BS’er. But he never really swings low like this. When Trump is on, he treats his audience like they have a brain, and he doesn’t get enough credit for that. Biden is a scripted, phony campaign ad come to life.
It can be tough for a Democrat, what with having very little media quality control to keep them in check. I can’t even think of a Democrat ever being called out on a climate change falsehood. So, invariably, the tales get wilder and wilder. And sooner or later, CO2 causes cancer, or headaches, or bad breath.
That said, Trump is in a class all by himself for BS’ing Republicans. And I doubt Democrats would stick to their lies like Trump does. Democrats just need more basic quality control.
Yes, make sure that when you highlight the Dems’ craziness, you throw in a dig at the President so you can virtue-signal how you’re not one of those icky MAGA-hat wearing conservatives.
I think the salient difference is that the Democrats say untrue things in an effort to sell a program which, where they to be honest and factually correct, few people would support. They lie (and/or say preposterously ignorant things) in order to push policy.
In contrast, the President just says whatever comes to mind. It isn’t a tool of persuasion, particularly, just the way he talks.
Drew, you remind me of my younger brother John. (That’s a compliment, by the way: he’s my best friend and a wonderful person.)
John is a hard-core pro-Trump MAGA-hat-wearing entrepreneur. He was busting on me this morning about this post, saying that it was my usual tepid, damning with faint praise treatment of Trump. We had a long talk about the persuasive value of an admission against interest. I tried to explain to him that, if I get caught up trying to defend the literal comments Trump makes, I’ll lose any credibility I have in my criticism of Democratic misstatements.
I think rgb’s comment here misses the point, in that Trump doesn’t lie like the Democrats lie — and the Democrat lies are far worse in both intention and consequence. Trump’s lies are of the “you look fantastic/I promise you’ll love it” variety, whereas the Democrats’ lies are more the “sure I’ll bring your car back after I use it/if you don’t buy this product your children will die” kind of thing. Trump wants you to like him; the Democrats want your money and your obedience.
Anyway, rgb aside, it isn’t virtue signaling to acknowledge that the President has some challenging qualities. And I think one is more persuasive to the large middle that is neither wildly pro-Trump nor wildly anti-Trump if one does acknowledge that.
You should listen to him. I am weary of so-called conservatives always qualifying any statement about the president by assuring their listeners that they’re not one of those “MAGA-hat-wearing” people. For some reason they feel like they have to offer criticism of the President first before they can offer criticism of Democrats. As if doing the former means they have grounds for doing the latter.
Conservatives too often fear that their own positions aren’t valid.
IDK about that. Biden bloviates on CAGW because he wants to own the issue, without actually knowing much about it. Its “compensating”. Trump “owned” many conservative issues in much the same way. Fewer details, more rhetoric. I don’t think that says anything about whether those underlying issues are useless or not.
The real test is whether people that actually are educated on climate change correct Biden….or go with the “but he fights!” excuse that conservatives use with Trump.
That’s not an excuse. That’s a complete change of tactics for the typically gutless GOP.
Drew, I don’t mind ruffling the feathers of hard-core Trump supporters: we have their vote already. I’m more interested in persuading lukewarm Trump supporters and would-be supporters. There are more of them, and their votes are the ones we need next year.
I think honestly acknowledging Trump’s flaws right up front is the best way to do that.
How cynical.
You know what the GOP hasn’t got? Trump supporters’ votes for 2024.
And nobody in the GOP is prepared for that.
I think you’re comparing apples and oranges.
Think of the factually challenged statements Trump has made, and tell me what horribly destructive policy he is trying to persuade us to endorse with his unreliable rhetoric.
Now do the same with the Democrats. Socialism, the end of fossil fuels, abortion-until-birth, nuclear Iran, gun confiscation, open borders: these are big issues about which the left is deliberately or merely ignorantly deceptive.
I agree that Biden doesn’t care about global warming; almost no one over the age of eight actually cares about global warming. The sins I attribute to him are generic sins of the left: they say whatever it takes to further their agenda, repeating half-truths, untruths, discredited, distorted, and cherry-picked “facts” as necessary. Biden is, as you said, simply trying to ride that mendacious train into the White House.
This is precisely why I was opposed to candidate Donald J. Trump throughout the primaries: however much good he does in the short term, we have to wonder what effect he’ll have in the long term.
It would be helpful if he worked, in this next term, to be less gratuitously polarizing, while still standing strong against the leftist press and establishment. The economy is doing well, the world is reasonably stable, and he has a good story to tell. We should build on that, avoiding pointless drama and sniping.
The press and pop-culture icons have sunk so low that it would be pretty easy, right now, to claim the high ground. I’m hoping he does that.
Liberals talk endlessly about Trump’s “lies,” but really get mad when he tells the truth. Remember the reaction to his tweets about Baltimore?
Absolutely.
I do understand why some people are bothered by the preemptive acknowledgement of Trump’s tendency to speak first and fact-check later. But, if we don’t do that, then we fail to puncture the notion that (1) all politicians lie (probably true) and (2) they all lie in the same way and to the same end (certainly not true).
It’s a point worth making, if the goal is to persuade the undecided.
Uh . . . I think you misunderstand what I’m saying. The President brought in a whole bunch of enthusiastic voters from both sides of the aisle. You can’t buy the sort of enthusiasm he engenders. For once, the proles felt like they had someone paying attention to them on issues that were important to them — not important to lobbyists and corporate cronies. The “forgotten man” was finally remembered. The President, unlike most of Washington, actually likes Americans, and they return that affection.
The GOP has nobody to step into that void. That is entirely the making of a GOP that has spent years ignoring and dismissing (and arguably still dismissing) the citizen class.
The GOP has no idea how to capture these peoples’ votes once Trump steps off the stage. It’s telling that you think this is somehow the President’s fault.
Drew, I think I understood what you were saying. I think I disagree with your interpretation of the reality.
The President did attract a lot of non-conventional Republican voters. That doesn’t mean that the message he used to attract them is one the GOP should embrace. There may be other ways to attract working class middle America, with messages of cleaned up government, deregulation, and the promise of a booming economy. We can talk about border security without leaving ourselves open to plausible charges of xenophobia; we can talk about reviving the manufacturing sector without seeming to agitate for a trade war.
Unfortunately, one of the groups of voters we’re in danger of losing, the middle-class suburban mother, we’re in danger of losing largely, I think, because of unnecessary aspects of President Trump’s style. This isn’t something the GOP can fix by being more Trump-like. It’s something only Trump can fix, by being less Trump-like. These people are really offended by problematic aspects of the President’s character, aspects that only Trump has it within his power to control.
My point is that Trump brings some things we need and some things we could better do without. The things that we need, we really need: the thick skin, the disregard for the press, the willingness to be politically incorrect, and the fundamentally conservative policies. But the things we could do better without are things that we shouldn’t seek in the next candidate — and things that, if Trump didn’t have them, would make it easier to win back some of those voters that, in this economy, should be flocking to us.
I’m not sure why you think I blame Trump for the GOP’s failure to do a better job at getting its message out. I don’t: the GOP has been doing a poor job of selling conservative ideas for years. Trump is even worse at it, but he’s hardly the problem.