Posted on 12/15/2017 5:15:30 AM PST by grundle
The New York Times, which promised to do a better job at unbiased reporting after the election, actually reported with a straight face that President Obama only lied 18 times in his entire presidency. Take a second to recover from laughter (or outrage).
David Leonhardt, Ian Prasad Philbrick, and Stuart A. Thompson considered it a challenge when they heard from Trump supporters who after reading the NYT's list of lies of President Trump said: “Yes, but if you made a similar list for previous presidents, it would be just as bad.”
“We’ve set out to make that list,” the authors stated. “Here, you will find our attempt at a comprehensive catalog of the falsehoods that Barack Obama told while he was president.”
The NYT writers promised they “applied the same conservative standard to Obama and Trump, counting only demonstrably and substantially false statements.”
Their result: Obama, 18 lies in 8 years, while Trump told 103 in just 10 months! Don’t believe them? Just check out that handy colorful chart above. You'll see.
In his first 10 months in office, he has told 103 separate untruths, many of them repeatedly. Obama told 18 over his entire eight-year tenure. That’s an average of about two a year for Obama and about 124 a year for Trump.
The writers inform us that Trump’s lies were only counted once, and not the ones he repeated:
If we had used a less strict standard, Trump would look even worse by comparison. He makes misleading statements and mild exaggerations – about economic statistics, his political opponents and many other subjects – far more often than Obama. We left out any statement that could be plausibly defended even if many people would disagree with the president's interpretation. We also left out modest quantitative errors, such as Trump's frequent imprecision with numbers.
The article even went back to George W. Bush, although fact-checkers weren’t as busy with him as they were with Obama and now Trump. In its conclusion, “Trump is different” in that he continues to tell a lie even after proven otherwise.
“When [Obama and Bush] became aware that they had been saying something untrue, they stopped doing it,” the writers claimed. For example, Obama never repeated the “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” line and Bush “changed the way he spoke about Iraq’s weapons capabilities.”
The writers further protected Obama:
As for Obama: His falsehoods tended to be attempts to make his own policies look better or to overstate a problem he was trying to solve. In a few cases, they seemed to be careless exaggerations he avoided repeating.
Over all, Obama rarely told demonstrable untruths as president. And he appears to have become more careful over time. We counted six straight-up falsehoods in his first year in office. Across his entire second four-year term, we counted the same number, six, only one of which came in his final year in office.
In all, we found 18 different bald untruths from Obama during his presidency.
But Trump…
Trump is trying to make truth irrelevant. It is extremely damaging to democracy, and it’s not an accident. It’s core to his political strategy.
In fact, Trump tells falsehoods about Obama and his administration more often than Obama told falsehoods about all subjects.
So, when the “professionals” can’t seem to — or better, don’t want to — mine for the lies that passed the nicotine-stained lips of Barack Obama, the little guy does it. Here’s a site considered “well sourced” of 1,366 examples of Obama’s lies while president.
Meanwhile, the NYT could only find 18?!? Weird for an unbiased news source who swears it’s trying to move outside the bubble and see how the rest of America views Washington.
Perhaps the Times should have checked out Jack Cashill’s book of Obama lies, You Lie. Obama’s lies were about issues of war and peace, such as his comment that ISIS was a mere JV team, or that al-Qaeda was on the run, while almost all of Trump’s “lies” are either simple exaggerations or carelessly assembled facts and only qualify as lies in the demented minds of Trump haters.
It started with his first:
"I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."
After that big lie, nothing else matters....
NYT Lied 4,382 Times; Obama Only Lied 1800 Times in 8 Years; Trump Charts Are Low
The working definition of “lie” is “disagreement with the Party Line of the moment.”
Width=600
His entire life is a lie.
“I first learned about this current scandal when I read about it in the newspaper”
“I gave up smoking”
“No tax increases on the middle class”
“Under Obamacare your costs will go down”
“I’ve been going through an evolution on this issue (of same sex marriage even though he was 100% in support dating back to his answer in a 1996 questionaire)”.
Isn’t it a hate crime to murder even one sickly sapling to produce newsprint so that this criminal lying rag can be published?
Obama let other people lie for him while he spent all day sitting in his barcalounger watching ESPN.
“You didn’t build that” is conspicuous by its absence.
I got a new doctor. I don’t care if he exaggerates a little.
Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha
"It is to laugh."
Then there are those truly awful gaffes which I consider micro-lies of which Obama made hundreds.
So to prove President Trump a liar they proclaim Obama a liar, but Trump is worse than Obama.
Progressive logic never ceases to amaze.
The New York Times lies every day.
"You're a dummy...one.
The NYT obviously doesn’t count those stories that were obfuscated, or simply buried. Omission of the truth is the same as a lie, maybe worse.
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