A Campaign of Lies: US Candidates Unabashed in Truth Stretching
In this year’s US presidential election, truth is in short supply. Both the Democrats and the Republicans have become more unabashed in their lies than ever before. With a mainstream media weakened by the appearance of partisan bias and editorial staffs that have been ravaged during the crisis, many of the whoppers won’t be second-guessed.
Republican Party presidential candidate Paul Ryan is a fitness freak. At the crack of dawn, he likes to lift weights in the catacombs of the Capitol Building. He says it has helped him to maintain a body fat index of between 6 and 8 percent. Ryan can also run very fast — at least so he claims. The conservative candidate even told a radio host he had completed a marathon in “under three, I think, you know, high twos … a two hour and fifty-something.”
Twenty-six miles (42 kilometers) in under three hours? With a time like that, Ryan could practically fall back on a career as a marathon runner if he doesn’t manage to secure the United States’ second highest political office. US fitness magazines quickly expressed their doubts, with some actually bothering to research marathon statistics. They found only one entry, from 1999, that included Ryan. What they unearthed was data that read more like a hobby jogger than a running machine: four hours and one minute.
Ryan was forced to concede that he had remembered things incorrectly. Was it a big deal? Of course not. But it is still an episode that is telling of this US election. Never before have candidates on both sides lied so openly and so unabashedly — about their own merits, but also about the plans of their rivals. The development prompted one New York Times columnist to warn: “Facts are for losers. The truth is dead.”
The marathon incident was the exception; Ryan was forced to apologize. But much more audacious attempts at manipulating the truth in this election have gone unpunished — largely because strategists in both the Republican and Democratic camps are coolly calculating that people these days are no longer being held liable for their lies in politics.