When you’re absolutely committed to the premise that your Party and Leader are always right, you often get lead into the realm of surreal intellectual confusion. Consider WaPo’s absurd partisan columnist Marc Thiessen, who I only read when prompted, and his confusion about simple definitions:
Donald Trump may be remembered as the most honest president in modern American history.
Don’t get me wrong, Trump lies all the time. He said that he “enacted the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history” (actually they are the eighth largest) and that “our economy is the strongest it’s ever been in the history of our country” (which may one day be true, but not yet). In part, it’s a New York thing — everything is the biggest and the best.
But when it comes to the real barometer of presidential truthfulness — keeping his promises — Trump is a paragon of honesty. For better or worse, since taking office Trump has done exactly what he promised he would.
There is a clear and easily understood difference between honesty and promises.
The former has to do with the deliberate assertion of facts, true or untrue. It requires a knowing use of deceit, or not; the stringent personality would demand that deliberately presenting an assertion as a true fact, despite knowing your own ignorance of the actual situation, also qualifies as dishonesty. Your mileage may vary.
A promise is an assertion concerning the future. It often concerns an action, sometimes that of the one making the action, sometimes others.
It’s possible to assert that a promise is made with no intention to fulfill it, but a dishonest promise is not in the same category as being honest or lying.
And what’s going on here? Thiessen is striking a blow in defense of his Leader in hopes of convincing voters who value honesty that honesty is promises kept, rather than simply being true assertions concerning the world. He’d like us to forget that candidate Trump claimed we were in the worst crime wave the United States had ever seen, when the honest fact, taken from FBI statistics, was precisely the opposite – our crime stats were, and are, down to nearly historical lows. He’d like us to forget so many allied lies, so many deceits, and so many instances of the lies’ dirty cousin, the taking of credit for others’ work, that major newspapers keep statistics on them, noting them on an incident per day basis.
Think about that. If those statistics could be credibly rebutted, it might be worth dismissing them, but they’re not. I’ve read a few. How many other politicians have made it worth the newspapers expending resources on counting the mendacious utterances of a politician? I can’t think of any, frankly.
And, as a deft bit of dog whistling for the Republicans, he inserted this little blooper:
… he did not pass his signature legislative achievement on the basis of a lie (“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it ”) — which is clearly worse than falsely bragging that your tax cut is the biggest ever.
Yep, Obama made a promise, and then broke it. But is that as bad as out and out menial lying? (Note the category error on Thiessen’s part as well.) Really? Or is it more reasonable to consider Obama’s promise to be in the same class as Trump’s promises – things he’ll damn well try to do, but not all political promises can be kept, because we’re all adults here and know that sometimes someone promises to do something and finds it beyond them.
But, absent evidence that Obama knowingly didn’t plan to fulfill that promise – and I’ve never heard of any such evidence – it’s merely a promise that he advanced but couldn’t fulfill. Perhaps he shouldn’t have made it. Perhaps he should have clarified that as something he’d attempt but couldn’t guarantee. Nuance like that rarely flies well with voters.
But I don’t think it was a lie. I think Thiessen merely wants to cloud the thinking of the voter predisposed to dislike Obama. Clouding the issue is a standard tactic for those pundits with a claim to advance they know to be dubious.
So let’s be entirely clear here. He’s trying to confuse voters who dislike Trump for lying by suggesting that promises kept, or attempted, should really be the currency of honesty, rather than the misleading lies that Trump is told. Is this the reasoning that adults should buy into?
Or should voters become even more suspicious when the defenders of a known liar decide to try to change the meaning of the words involved?
Addition 18 Oct 2018: I’ve noticed quite a few views of this post, but I have no idea how readers are coming upon it. I’d appreciate it if readers could let me know how this particular post came to your attention. There’s a mail link to the right, at the top of the page. – Hue White
