I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the charges of lying that are so frequently being leveled during the presidential campaign, not necessarily by the president or vide president or their opponents but with disappointing regularity by his supporters or the partisans of the other side. I see that the charges haven’t been lost on Daniel Henninger:
“Liar” is a potent and ugly word with a sleazy political pedigree. But “liar” is not being deployed only by party attack dogs or the Daily Kos comment queue. Mitt Romney is being called a “liar” by officials at the top of the Obama re-election campaign. Speaking the day after the debate in the press cabin of Air Force One, top Obama adviser David Plouffe said, “We thought it was important to let people know that someone who would lie to 50 million Americans, you should have some questions about whether that person should sit in the Oval Office.”
The Democratic National Committee’s Brad Woodhouse said, “Plenty of people have pointed out what a liar Mitt Romney is.” Deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter says Republicans “think lying is a virtue.”
Explicitly calling someone a “liar” is—or used to be—a serious and rare charge, in or out of politics. It’s a loaded word. It crosses a line. “Liar” suggests bad faith and conscious duplicity—a total, cynical falsity.
Politics isn’t beanbag, but politicians past had all sorts of devices to say or suggest an opponent was playing fast and loose with the truth. This week’s Obama TV ad, “How Can We Trust Mitt Romney?” would have been perfectly legit absent the Plouffe “liar” prepping.
Before we can move on to consider whether the charges are just or not I think we need to define our terms. Lying is the knowing telling of an untruth with the intent to deceive. It has four components: there must be an utterance, the utterance must be untrue, the untruthful utterance must have been made in the knowledge that it was untrue, and the person making the utterance must have intended to deceive someone hearing the utterance.
Let’s take an example, something very frequently asserted. Did Bush lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
I don’t believe so. He definitely suggested that Iraq did so I think we can reasonably conclude that there was an utterance. Was it untrue? We honestly don’t know. As someone else once said, “Absence of proof is not proof of absence”. We didn’t find large stores of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but that does not prove they weren’t there at the time of the utterance or that the president knew that they weren’t there. Did the president make the statement in the full knowledge that it was untrue? I don’t think that’s the case, either. Finally, did he intend to deceive by the utterance? I find little evidence that was the case. Contrariwise, I think he was merely making as strong a case as he could for the course of action he’d decided was necessary.
My opposition to the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with the presence or absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I had other reasons which I don’t particularly want to go into now but I don’t believe that Bush lied.
Much has been made of the president’s promises to lower the deficit and Mitt Romney’s remarks about cutting taxes, with one person or another saying the the president or Mr. Romney is lying. I think the remarks are aspirational, of the “chicken in every pot” variety. They aren’t lies and they aren’t said with an intention to deceive. They’re wishes.
Differences of opinion, particularly in areas in which the item under discussion is not falsifiable, are not lying. When someone says they believe in the existence of God they aren’t lying. If God does not exist, they are wrong but, if God exists, they are right. The existence is neither falsifiable nor provable (although I have encountered professors of philosophy who found Aquinas’s proof of the existence of God dispositive).
Things like whether the stimulus actually produced economic growth or whether absent the actions taken by the federal government the economy would have collapsed are not falfisiable. They are matters of opinion and the empirical evidence on both is at best equivocal. I find pronouncing someone a liar because he does not hold the same opinion as you do reprehensible, particularly in an academic who has higher professional obligations.
Just say he’s wrong and provide your best proof. Don’t say he’s a liar.
Well the President and his people keep getting caught telling untruths.
Example, Obama has recently asserted that the Fast & Furious program began during the Bush administration. This is untrue. The President must know it is untrue (or he is the most uninformed man in his Administration), but he has made the utterance most recently (I believe) on Univision, and the intent is clearly to place blame elsewhere. The President is lying.
I’m not even going to go into the evidence of the President (and many high staffers) lying about various aspects of the Benghazi assassinations as that ground is so well trod as to look like the field at Agincourt at the end of the day.
On the other side we have repeated flip-flops by Romney through the years, most notably on abortion. It is impossible to believe that Romney hasn’t been lying on that issue at some point. A staffer’s comments last Spring about the Etch-a-Sketch didn’t give one much hope on these matters.
I also find it impossible to believe that Romney really believes his budget proposals can possibly work, but that gets into the aspirational issue.
Regardless, neither man seems particularly trustworthy, but Obama is the only one lying (badly) about matters of national security at the moment.
I think that was ignorance. I don’t think the president is interested enough in details to determine what the actual history of the program was. I don’t honestly understand the parade of explanations that followed the Benghazi disaster. It’s possible that the president is among the long list of our presidents who are absolutely incapable of telling the truth when it casts them in an unfavorable light.
I think that was ignorance. I don’t think the president is interested enough in details to determine what the actual history of the program was.
That’s good, because it’s not like anybody was killed.
As for Benghazi – what’s so miserable is that the lies have been so bad.
The combination of disinterest, dishonesty and incompetence is really setting this Administration apart. I cannot think of a President that had so little interest in the job, although there must have been someone in that line of mostly anonymous 19th Century Presidents somewhere that comes close. I’m starting to wonder what it would be like if we had a President who actually showed interest in the job.
How about only including 49 states in a jobs >jobless claim statistic, leaving out one large state’s filings, is that a lie? Is such an omission manipulation ok, in trying to get one sensational headline out there, indicating that fewer people are filing for unemployment?
jan, that happens sometimes. (I follow these things.) Also states sometimes report incomplete information. Usually though the states at least provide an estimate even if they can’t get the actual number reported on time. (This helps explain the revisions of prior week’s data. This isn’t a survey, this is a straight count.)
However I seriously suspect manipulation this time. The timing is just too damned suspicious. I’ve come to distrust just about anything that comes from this crowd. I’ve been training myself to not accept even things I want to hear at face value.
Glancing at the report I’m thinking that it’s probably Texas that didn’t report. There were numbers in there for several of the other big states.
I would substitute the phrase “factual statement” for “utterance.” For example, reporting intelligence typically involves collecting disparate pieces of information and deriving as useful and coherent summation as possible. Some people may reach different conclusions and the conclusions may change with new information.
Since the statement must be factual, not an opinion or summation, it is possible to falsify it. (Though opinions/summations can be false if their basis is false)
The problem is that so many of the statements of fact that are being branded as lies are in fact just differences of opinion. I’ll acknowledge that my articulation is clumsy.
Some are true (for certain values of the word “true”).
Some are true (for certain values of the word “trueâ€).
Reminds me of something a fellow grad student like to say back in the day. “Two plus two equals four, even for arbitrarily large values of two!”
…
Maybe only a math geek would find that funny….
Yeah, it’s a mathematician wisecrack.
And it’s looking like it the problem was with California, not Texas. Apparently they didn’t get everything processed. I’m wondering how it is that they had some California specific data in the meat of the report, though.
Probably the number should have been 15 to 25 thousand higher than it was. In other words it was just another week.
Yeah, it’s a mathematician wisecrack.
Would it help if I discussed the difference between Peano’s Axioms and Frege’s construction? No? Anyone? Bueller?
The problem is that so many of the statements of fact that are being branded as lies are in fact just differences of opinion. I’ll acknowledge that my articulation is clumsy.
I don’t think you are being clumsy at all, Dave — just civil and non-confrontational — which is a good tact to take.
Instead of using the ‘L’ word, people can say, “That’s not true.” or “That’s not how I see it or how it pencils out for me.” or “I disagee with your numbers, your perspective, your philosophy…” etc. There are many ways to say the same thing, without using the emotionally damning condemnation of “You lie!”
I don’ t know which of these is worse, that he was lying or that he was simply ignorant.
Verdon, why choose?
Heh, a lying ignoramus…..okay that works for me too.
Yeah, great post. “Lies” about future predictions are especially annoying to me as are “lies” that don’t agree with some “scientific” study.
I would agree with your general comments about equating aspirational statements about lying, but Henninger is ignorant and a partisan hack. He equates the Dems with Nazis because they called Mitt a liar, claiming that this all started with the fascists of the 1930s. Calling other politicians a liar has been fairly common throughout our electoral history. Jackson was called a liar by the Republicans (also a drunkard, adulterer, slave trader, and a thief). Republicans called Douglas a liar. In more modern times, we have examples of Congressmen (and candidates) calling presidents and candidates liars.
Steve
Republicans called jackson a liar? Andrew Jackson? Did they use a time machine?
Well, Douglas was a liar, and he lied about things that could be proven incorrect (was Lincoln carried off the stage after one of their debates; was Douglas reading from the actual Republican platform; had the Illinois legislature passed a specific resolution ?) Sometimes he appeared to lie about things for his own amusement and to get a response from the audience, such as that he knew Lincoln as a drinker. But basically Douglas was a gifted drunk on the stage, and could be as eloquent and politically astute as he could be sloppy with details.