re: #294 Blind Frog Belly White

Okay, let’s dissect this: At the famous “Please proceed, Governor” debate, Mitt Romney said Obama didn’t call it an act of terror for several days, despite Obama saying it the very morning after.

It was not true. It was a demonstrable falsehood, to coin a phrase. But I’m 98% certain Mitt Romney thought it was. Romney would have been a total fucking moron to say it if he knew it wasn’t true. He’d heard it from the echo chamber of the Right.

So, you could say it was a lie. But was Romney lying when he said it?

Now, as for it being a faulty analogy, I disagree. The Right acted, and continues to act as if using the term ‘Radical Islamic Terrorism’ has some talismanic power, and now it looks to me as if the Left thinks using the term ‘lie’ has similar power.

Here’s where my problem is: it’s still a lie. It might not have been the lie of the person who said it specifically, but it’s a lie. Someone passing along the lie because they believe it does not make it not a lie. And Trump has lied, in ways that Dems have and got called lies before (how many promises has Trump made that were broken or turned to bullshit that compare or overshadow ‘Politifact’s Lie Of The Year’ in ‘if you like your doctor, you can keep them’?), and yet they go out of their way not to use direct language, hemming and hawing and giving him room to act like he was just misinformed and just wouldn’t have said that if he actually knew better.

It’s consistent use of weasely language in ways they absolutely never ever do when they’re calling out Dems (which is why Haberman’s tweet saying that the Clinton Campaign ‘lied, and with sanctimony’ keeps getting brought up). Look how powerful the impression is left when people are consistently told Clinton ‘lied’, while brushing off Trump and his ‘myriad of falsehoods and misrepresentations’.