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No, it's a fine trade because the general trust was utterly non-existent among the red tribe. Again, this complaint is Lucy crying "why won't you let me lie to you forever, Charlie Brown?"
Joe Biden goes utterly senile in office and the nation is run by a shadowy cabal of unnamed, unelected staffers and the real problem is the entitled electorate having the gall to ask questions about it.
George Bush lies us into Iraq (with a critical assist from the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden, aka the man who handpicked the liars for the hearings), resulting in a million dead brown people, torching trillions of dollars from the treasury, destabilizing a large chunk of the world, terroristic blowback, total loss of America's moral standing in the world, sparking resentment and contempt from our allies and leaving us dangerously weak for the future. Totally fine, respectable elder statesman. Don't you know he paints?
Meanwhile, Trump says he has the biggest inauguration ever and he's a threat to democracy, a fascist, literally Hitler.
Sorry bro. You guys are just not serious people. Trump's lies are emphatically far from worse than the past, and they're still much less severe than the ones his enemies tell every day.
Man, that was like a whole paragraph to admit that everything I said was completely true, but still somehow pretend that you disputed it. Still better than average for a hack outfit like Politifact.
Who is "you guys"? This is the second time in as many comments that you've arbitrarily lumped me in with abstract or unnamed groups that you dislike. Knock it off, please.
I feel as though you are not reading my comments, much less engaging with them, but rather immediately composing a reply in your head as you skim. I wrote a whole ass bit about how you're (now deliberately, I assume) conflating red tribe distrust in the traditional news media ecosystem with the actual and official communications from the President and his team, and then you just go ahead and blithely do it again in the very first sentence you write.
And demonstrate the exact same thing yet again in short order. How can Obama lie in 2007 about something that doesn't even exist yet?? That everyone agreed didn't exist yet? Almost literally no candidate ever has fully formed legislation ready to go while on the campaign trail. You're right about Obama lying -- in 2013-ish, and probably he lied (or misrepresented, it's a fine line for some things) about the health care plan during the 2012 election, but that's not what you said (you were very specific about the time frame), and all I did was point that out. No big deal, it happens. We all are wrong sometimes on small stuff. You're allowed to admit it.
I guess I'm baffled that you earnestly think they aren't deeply, viciously conflated. To my eye, they have been my entire adult life.
Bush 1 had an entire cable news network dedicated to pushing his agenda. Karl Rove was hailed as a mastermind of media manipulation and manufacturing consent for his ability to conflate news media and official government policy. The illusion of independence was just another trick, a distraction so we wouldn't catch the sleight of hand.
And all of that was a pittance compared to what the overwhelming majority of American media did to itself in the orgy of religious fervor that accompanied the election of Barak Obama.
And I guess I'm also baffled as to how you think that was a response to everything I said? Biden's lies about senility, Bush's lies to start a war, and Obama's lies about policy were all coming from the official communications of the president. When a Democrat Senator claims, on the floor of the Senate, to have personally seen proof that then-candidate Romney lied on his taxes, and then latter brushed it off as an acceptable lie because it worked, does that not count as official? When a Democrat congressman claim to have personally seen evidence that Trump colluded with Russia, is that official enough?
So yes, Trump lies, as most politicians do. He's in fine company, and honestly comes across as less vicious about it than many of his peers. Let me know when he kills a million brown people for blood oil. And yes, as a distinct-but-linked matter, most of our media consistently lies about Trump's lies to pretend he's some unprecedented Prince of Lies.
You're not a new account. You didn't just fall out of a coconut tree. Why does this stuff seem novel to you?
What are you even thinking here? Obama in 2007 had speeches about why he should be president; do you really think nothing said in those can count as a lie because the exact laws and policies haven't been formally written yet? Or because it's not said with some mystical imprimatur of the Official Office of the Presidency? Would you give Trump a pass from when he claimed to have a plan to end the Ukraine War because, to quote you, "Almost literally no candidate ever has fully formed legislation ready to go while on the campaign trail"?
I suppose I might be taking for granted that you're familiar with the history here (because it's a hobby horse I've been riding so long the horse can almost vote) so I'll lay it out in more detail. The beginning here was from interviews with his speechwriters years later.
In 2007, Obama's election team landed him a speech before a large medical association. His speechwriters sat down to plan out what to say, and realized that his healthcare plan was "we don't have a healthcare plan". Not even at the level of "early campaign website fluff". So they said "Fuck it. We'll just go huge. Promise everything to everyone. More access, better care, less cost. We'll make it a great speech, really lean into the technocratic progressivism, really raise his profile, and then we'll have 8-12 years to figure something out because Hillary has this one in the bag. We're just laying groundwork for now."
Then of course they speechified so well he won the nomination and the election, in no small part because Team Obama and Team Obama's Media constantly talked up his great plan. Do you like Leslie Knope? Do you like the West Wing? It's just like that! Obama knows theory better than his theory advisors and practicals better than his practical advisors, and he has a perfect plan, all 3-ring binders and tabs and highlighters, and it's taken everything into account. THIS is technocratic progressivism, delivering Change You Can Believe In.
Here is Politifact in 2008 rating the "you can keep it" rhetoric as "true", because that's what Obama said his plan would do! Literally no effort to, say, evaluate if that was a realistic or likely outcome.
Here's another from 2009, where they walked it back to "half true", but even that article sounds like it was written by someone on his campaign team.
And of course there was no plan, it was rhetoric and a vibe, which is why he ended up just cribbing Mitt Romney's notes and letting the insurance companies write a bunch of it. And so by 2013 it gets elevated to Lie of the Year, because Politifact doesn't need to protect Obama through another election and millions of people are obviously having their plans and doctors changed under them.
There's media spin, and then there are direct quotes from the President. That's my whole point. Trump's out there lying about trivial stuff, not just the big stuff, and directly rather than let a media machine handle the lifting. It may seem like a distinction without a difference to you, but it is important. (And as I noted, it's quite possible that Trump is or has lied about some big scandal that isn't yet known, we as always must wait for history to take its course before the judgements can start to come out with certainty on that front)
Candidates promise stuff they want to do. I take it in the spirit they are said. If Trump says he wants to end the Ukraine war, and has a plan to do so... does he make an effort to do so? I do happen to think he made an effort, even if it was a stupid and doomed one. So, not a lie! I do think he was exaggerating about doing so on Day 1 - that's obviously almost literally impossible for a president to do, so maybe it falls under the deception umbrella but I wouldn't call it a lie as such. More generally I don't consider the 100-day traditional promises to be binding, only that an attempt is made. That's the whole point of being a candidate, to outline where you want the country to go, and what you hope to deliver. Everyone in the process knows that it's better to overpromise and underdeliver than underpromising and overdelivering, right? Voters even expect it. In that sense, though I absolutely hate to be in the shoes defending PolitiFact, a 2008-era assessment of truth is more about whether a claim accurately reflects or summarizes the policy as portrayed by the source (so "true" is broadly correct), not about whether it is practical or not - though this limitation, as we both know, was flagrantly ignored by various fact-checking sites increasingly often as time has gone on. Of which I've always disapproved.
Once you're president, things change. In Obama's case, much of the first year of his presidency he spent talking about how he really wanted the health care bill to be bipartisan, to get some Republican support, and so on which he was very loud about. He ended up being wrong about that, but it frames his entire effort! Self-evidently a health care effort that is hoped to be bipartisan will involve compromises short of the partisan ideal. I think it's reasonable to expect that main pillars would stay the same and not be subject to compromise, but even that doesn't always tend to be the case when it comes to the nuts and bolts of legislation-making. Also, Obama didn't exactly hide that he approved, in terms of general strategy, of taking the 'best' ideas and combining them regardless of provenance (that's a classically technocratic view), though for PR reasons this is usually not smart to emphasize.
When Trump lies in a debate about immigrants eating the pets of their neighbors, yeah it's bad, but it doesn't do structural damage because he's communicating a vibe and not actually responsible for policy and enforcement. When Trump as president says the BLS commissioner is rigging data, we assume he has some kind of internal line of proof to suggest such; when it turns out he doesn't even have a scrap, it does structural damage. Again, the presidential asymmetry of information access - and control! - obligates the president to a higher degree of truthfulness. Usually, for example, more banal attempts at lower-grade deception would take the form of carefully worded non-answers by the press secretary. The press secretary is, in most cases, being narrowly truthful, but selective with such. Yet Trump's press secretaries and himself both seem to tell bald-faced lies with very little compunction. What I'm trying to get you to see is that my point is about the direct wording, it matters. What happens in the spin between a press conference and the news reporting on it can be worrisome, but it's of a different scale and degree than the press conference stuff itself.
Not to harp on the BLS example too much, but it's just such a clear-cut case, you can watch the conference I'm talking about here. Miller is saying how the last decade has seen massive overall aggregate errors, and as he's about to clarify that he doesn't mean to insinuate anything... At 1:35 Trump jumps in and states directly: "if it was an error that would be one thing, but I don't think it was an error, I think they did it purposefully". Miller, who has a more traditional respect for the truth when in positions of power, immediately does damage control and hedges "whether that - you may well be right - but even if it wasn't purposefully, it's incompetent". MILLER is doing things structurally safe - oh look, she was in charge during so many errors, she should have been better, that's why we're firing her. TRUMP is doing the structural damage. He tweeted that she rigged stuff, and he's digging in. He's in constant campaign mode with the ethics to match. He's not being an adult and not being responsible, and it's bad for everyone, even future Republican presidents.
In terms of Obama specifics, I'd be interested in details, yeah. I googled a little bit, one top result was this clip where an Obama speechwriter almost exactly says what I just said - that in retrospect the claim wasn't examined closely enough... but it was never, he emphasizes, viewed as being untrue by the team. This is at odds with your claim. Are you confusing it with his 2009 speech to the AMA, when he was already president? Maybe my google-fu is just failing me, but I can't find corroboration of your claim, despite its specificity.
If you want to accuse Obama of a campaign lie, the better one might be his initial rejection of an individual mandate, only for it to eventually make it into the bill. Although, if my memory is correct, Obama was pretty reluctant to do so. For example here is one reference to this process - partly forced by CBO policy, and partly by being confronted by the raw economics. How much credit do we allow for mind-changing? Reasonable people may disagree there. But if Obama portrayed himself as a mind-changing president who is open to ideas from across the aisle and from many sources, it seems in character. I'm on record here as opining that we should, as voters, more heavily weight the character and judgement of candidates, and put less on particular pet policies. Policies can reflect character, but the reality is we vote for a person, not a party, at the end of the day, who we trust implicitly to handle diverse situations as they may arise.
(With all that said, I was late in high school when Obama was elected, and only paid medium attention to the Obama-Romney campaign, so while I believe I'm correct in this portrayal I may be wrong in some particulars)
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I'll just note that this perception of moral standing was more self-perceived rather than actual. The Iraq War was not particularly relevant to the moral standing of the US in Latin America, Africa, or Asia, and it was far secondary from decades-long support for Israel in the Middle East. IE, the conflict regions of the Cold War, where US amorality or real politic were most personally known and a matter of living memory. The US standing circa 2003 was 'winner,' and possibly 'benefactor,' but not 'liberator.'
By remainder, the rest of the world leaves Europe- where the strength of views of the US intervention in Iraq largely hinged on alignment with the French and German objections and failed efforts to unite the continent in diplomatic opposition- and the US, whose views of the morality of the US largely tended to hinge on who was in the White House at the time. And, of course, the extension of americanized politics that cross those bounds.
Rather than the Americans losing moral standing in the world, Iraq was far more a shift in certain Americans losing their belief they had moral standing in the world.
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