Category: Truthfulness
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Pelosi’s Orwellian Mendacity: A STFU Moment
This from Nancy Pelosi's website (emphasis added): The Affordable Care Act, signed into law by President Obama in 2010, ensures that all Americans have access to quality, affordable health care and significantly reduces long-term health care costs. This historic legislation, in the league of Social Security and Medicare, will lead to healthier lives, while providing…
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An Incorrect Promise?
This from The New York Times: The split between lawmakers and the White House reflects the dilemma the president finds himself in as he seeks to follow through on last week’s acknowledgment about his incorrect promise on health care coverage. A statement is either true or false, correct or incorrect. "No Republican voted for Obamacare'…
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Promise or Lie? Falsehood or Half-Truth?
Some pundits and journalists keep referring to Obama's signature "If you like it, you can keep it, period" as a promise.* This is an incoherent use of 'promise.' Suppose a loan originator hands you a mortgage contract and says, "I promise you that this loan is not callable." (A callable loan is one in which…
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For a Lie to be a Lie, Must There be an Intention to Deceive?
Tully Borland writes, You host my favorite blog on the internet. I can’t believe I didn’t find out about it until just a few months ago. May you blog forever. Here’s a counterexample to your latest definition which still includes an “intention to deceive”, i.e. here is a case of a lie where there is…
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More on Lying
Chad McIntosh e-mails: Here are some thoughts on your recent post on lying. You offer the following definition: A lie is a false statement made with the intention to deceive. I wonder if more should be said about what counts as a statement. You leave open the possibility that there are other ways of tokening…
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Dianne Feinstein: You Can Keep Your Health Plan Until the ObamaCare Bill is Enacted
The left-leaning Washington Post awarded President Obama four, count 'em, four pinocchios, its highest (dis)honor, for the repeatedly told lie for which he is now notorious. In one of its variations, it goes like this: “And if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away…
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On Misusing the Word ‘Lie’
Keith Burgess-Jackson rightly criticizes Rush Limbaugh for using . . . the terms "calculated lie," "purposeful lie," "intentional lie," and "knowing lie" (while referring to Barack Obama's claim that Americans could, if they so chose, keep their insurance policy and their doctor). Calculation, purpose, intention, and knowledge are built into the concept of a lie,…
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The Wages of Presidential Deception
Barack Obama does not have proprietary rights in presidential mendacity: he has many illustrious predecessors. But Obama has pushed the arts of deception, prevarication, and empty bluster to new heights. Unfortunately for him, the economy is bad, which fact will make it difficult for him to get away with his lies, bullshit, and Orwellian abuses…
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Exaggeration
Not content to say what is true, people exaggerate thereby turning the true into the false. This post analyzes a particular type of exaggeration which is illustrated by something Dennis Prager said on his radio show one morning: "Happiness is a moral obligation, not a psychological state." Since I agree that we have a moral…
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Obama as Bullshitter
While listening the other day to Barack Obama shuck and jive about fiscal responsiblity, shamelessly posturing as if he and not his Republican opponents is the fiscally responsible one, when he is in truth the apotheosis or, if you prefer, the Platonic Form of fiscal irresponsibility, I realized just how uncommonly good our POMO Prez…
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Lying in the Age of Obama
This may well be the best column Victor Davis Hanson has written. He meticulously documents the widespread lying, prevarication, and other offenses against truth among our elites, offers a diagnosis, and then addresses the question, Why not lie? Here is his beautiful answer: I end with three reasons to tell the truth. The majority has to…
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Truth and Truthfulness
The bathroom scale doesn't lie, but it doesn't tell the truth either. It is either accurate or inaccurate. Only a spiritual being can be either deceptive or truthful. I cannot lie by simply saying something false. I must have the intention to deceive. That is perfectly clear. Rather less obvious is that to tell the…
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Obama Lied Last Night About Arizona Senate Bill 1070
Here is the video clip of Obama lying to Romney and the rest of us in their second debate. Obama lies when he claims that on the Arizona law (S. B. 1070) law enforcement officers can stop people whom they merely suspect of being undocumented workers. Obama has told this lie before. The details are in…
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Why are People So Easy to Swindle?
People are so easy to swindle because the swindler has as accomplices the victim's own moral defects. When good judgment and moral sense are suborned by lust or greed or sloth or vanity or anger, the one swindled participates willingly in his own undoing. In the end he swindles himself. How is it, for example, that…