Dear Commons Community,
As the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump move into high gear, the media is having a field day on the veracity of each candidate. A recent CBS News poll found that 34 percent of registered voters say Clinton is honest and trustworthy compared with 36 percent for Trump. New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristoph compares the two candidates and comes to the conclusion that what Hillary does is the norm for most politicians while Trump is “off the charts” with his lying. Here is an excerpt:
“One persistent narrative in American politics is that Hillary Clinton is a slippery, compulsive liar while Donald Trump is a gutsy truth-teller..
Yet the idea that they are even in the same league is preposterous. If deception were a sport, Trump would be the Olympic gold medalist; Clinton would be an honorable mention at her local Y.
One metric comes from independent fact-checking websites…PolitiFact had found 27 percent of Clinton’s statements that it had looked into were mostly false or worse, compared with 70 percent of Trump’s. It said 2 percent of Clinton’s statements it had reviewed were egregious “pants on fire” lies, compared with 19 percent of Trump’s. So Trump has nine times the share of flat-out lies as Clinton.
Likewise, The Washington Post Fact-Checker has awarded its worst ranking, Four Pinocchios, to 16 percent of Clinton’s statements that it checked and to 64 percent of Trump’s.
“Essentially, Clinton is in the norm for a typical politician,” says Glenn Kessler, who runs Fact-Checker, while Trump “is just off the charts. There’s never been anyone like him, at least in the six years I have been doing this.”
Kristoph then provides a number of examples for each candidate; Clinton (email server, Benghazi) and Trump (the Iraq War, fund raising for veterans, seeing Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the 9/11 attack). His conclusion:
“In short, Clinton is about average for a politician in dissembling, while Trump is a world champion who is pathological in his dishonesty.”
Tony
