Intersting grahpic from our friends at Politifact. It shows the GOP Presidential candidates ranked according to the truthfuless of their statements. By and large the candidates most closely aligned with the Teaparty wing of the Republican party are the biggest liars, although there was a paucity of data on Huntsman.
Which is the head and which is the tail? Is the Teaparty base pushing the candidates to lie, or are the candidates and celebrities (I’d love to see a side by side comparison of Palin or Limbaugh) who lead the Teaparty feeding them false info? Hard to say, it probably goes both ways. But what we can can infer is the big liars are probably forcing the lessor lies into a campaign of more lies.
So how does Obama fare? He compares with the best of the GOP contenders, more honest than all them except Huntsman.
I love recycled Nate Silver stories as much as the next guy but they numbers of issues used here really are not statistically significant and make us (the rational/left) look fairly petty to use them.
Also, as Nate says “Secondly — and most importantly — PolitiFact only looks at statements that pique their interest. Here’s how Bill Adair, the editor of PolitiFact, described the process: “We select statements that we think readers will be curious about. If someone hears a claim and wonders, ‘Is that true?’ then its something that we’ll check.”
In other words, if former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney says the sky is blue, PolitiFact doesn’t bother grading the statement as True. So there is a sampling bias at play here. Accordingly, the following numbers should be interpreted with caution. They aren’t perfect indicators of the honesty of each candidate, and conclusions such as “Candidate X lies the most” or “Candidate Y is the most truthful” should probably not be drawn from the data.”
It’s quite true I suppose that we should be careful to draw conclusions from the data above but then I have to ask myself several questions.
1.Exactly how hard would it have been to get the statement right in the first place?
2. Is the error in their statements a reflection of lack of information on the topic?, or is it a known mis-statement to paint the present administration in a bad light?
Once you ask those two questions and realise that the answer to #1 is “not that hard” and that the answer to #2 would appear to be the latter of the two options most of the time, it becomes easier to accept the use of the statistics against the person in question.
“In other words, if former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney says the sky is blue, PolitiFact doesn’t bother grading the statement as True.”
You do realize that absolutely everyone tells the truth most of the time. What matters in terms of honesty is when people are talking about important and controversial subjects.
Heck, if we used your concept about tracking everything that is said, Faux News would even come out looking good. Most of the news reported on that channel is factually accurate (e.g. they did report that an earthquake happened on the east coast a few weeks ago).
In fact, that is likely how Faux News sucks their viewers into believing that they are a reasonably good news program. Most of what reported is indeed true…but especially for the important political aspects of their reporting, they consistently stream out lies, half-truths, and intermingle opinions in such a way that many in the viewing audience think it is fact.
By the number, Ron Paul beats Obama too. either the “Mostly True” plus “True” or “Half True” plus “Mostly True” plus “True”.