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.

Mitt Romney lied. He knew it was false when he said it. The “please proceed” remark was specifically to call him out for a lie (that Obama didn’t speak of terrorism on the same day of a terror attack). Romney claimed it was fourteen days.

He only won the first presidential debate because he employed a Gish Gallop (lying through a firehose of true and false statements, restating those, and adding opinions which are not facts).

I’m not sure why you are so resistant to using the term “lie” when “lie” is the correct term. “Radical Islamic Terror” has magical power for right wingers because it specifically ignores right wing terror and Christian religious terror, which has killed many more people in the USA.

Haberman works for the same fascist-curious newspaper that Judith Miller worked for as a stenographer for the GW Bush administration. She helped lie us into a war against a nation which did us no harm, and arguably caused the rise of that same “radical Islamic terror” we call the so-called Islamic State today.