Fact Checking's Newest Category: Cartoonish Super Lying

One of my less charitable memories from the Age of Dubya was just how infuriatingly far out of shape everyone in the media and virtually every elected official was willing to torque themselves in order to avoid calling Bush a liar.  The Mouth Wash blog helpfully compiled some of the more tortured examples here:

This country has the willies when it comes to accusing the president of lying, no matter how blatant the lying. Instead, the mainstream media and our politicians give us euphemisms for the accusation, lots and lots of euphemisms. If you listen for the euphemisms, you’ll soon be impressed that we find so many different ways to accuse the president of lying without actually using words such as “lies,” “lying,” or “liar.”

For instance, we read in the media that a blatant lie is a “now-disavowed claim.” We hear of “false” and “farfetched” accusations. Instead of calling Bush a “liar,” the media tells us of “questions about his credibility” and “the flap over Bush’s assertion.”

Intelligence is alternately “discredited,” “dubious,” “disputed,” “tainted,” “flawed,” “suspect,” “questionable,” and “faulty,” as if the intelligence itself is at fault, not those who “manipulated” and “hyped” it. Maybe misplacing the blame makes us feel a little better about the “falsehoods.”

We are told about “misstatements,” “false pretenses,” and “an assertion not approved by the CIA.” We read of “deficiencies,” “distortions,” “questions about prewar intelligence,” and “lapses by President Bush.” What we aren’t told is what actually happened—that for seven months George W. Bush and his gang fed us daily helping of “lies.” Why is everyone so afraid of that word?

Politicians get in the euphemism game as well. Instead of just saying “he lied,” Sen. Carl Levin gets long-winded. “The key question is whether administration officials made a conscious and a very troubling decision to create a false impression about the gravity and imminence of the threat that Iraq posed to America.” Like many others, he’s a nervous and talkative man when it comes to presidential lies.

Sen. Chuck Hagel refers to one of Bush’s lies as “another example of a very serious inconsistency.”

“They hyped it,” Joe Biden said on Meet the Press, which is a gentle way of saying, “They lied out their asses.” Politicians evidently use euphemisms to protect one another, or maybe it’s that they fear retribution from Bush. After all, he’s known for being good at that.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller says that Bush’s statements were “potentially misleading” and wants to know if we were “misled.” Rockefeller is evidently afraid to point out what we all already know, so he phrases the mild accusation as a question. A euphemism inside a euphemism. That earns bonus points, for those of you scoring at home.

Sen. Dick Lugar was evidently in a gentle, euphemistic mood when he said, “The basic assumptions … simply were inadequate to begin with.”

Some politicians get closer to calling the lies “lies.” Al Gore recently told us of a “a systematic effort to manipulate facts.” Sen. John Edwards talked about the “myths perpetrated by the Bush administration.”...

It was maddening.

And right up to the very end of the 2004 campaign, while John Kerry's presidential ambitions were being bulldozed onto the ash heap of history by the full-on, knives-out campaign style of Karl Rove, Matthew Dowd and the Swiftboat Liars...

...Kerry was still trying to play by the dainty, Beltway rules in which Democrats are never permitted to raise their voices or flat-out call out a liar as a liar. 

This was one of the more terrifying milestones along that long, dark road to Donald Trump.

And now, 14 years later, Republican lying all the time has become so brazen and endemic that The Washington Post has had to invent a new category just to contain it:

Meet the Bottomless Pinocchio, a new rating for a false claim repeated over and over again

...

Trump’s willingness to constantly repeat false claims has posed a unique challenge to fact-checkers. Most politicians quickly drop a Four-Pinocchio claim, either out of a duty to be accurate or concern that spreading false information could be politically damaging.

Not Trump. The president keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version of it. He is not merely making gaffes or misstating things, he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation.

To accurately reflect this phenomenon, The Washington Post Fact Checker is introducing a new category — the Bottomless Pinocchio. That dubious distinction will be awarded to politicians who repeat a false claim so many times that they are, in effect, engaging in campaigns of disinformation.

What the WaPo gets wrong, of course, is the idea that Trump's constant repetition of debunked lies represents something unique and unprecedented in Republican politics.  Anyone who was awake and paying attention during, say, the Age of Dubya knows this claim itself rates a "Bottomless Pinocchio".  Leaders of the Bush regime lied constantly, about all sorts of things:

And then they lied about their lies:

And they got away with it largely because the Right had already been feeding from the Fox New/Hate Radio cesspit so long that their brains could no longer metabolize reality that was inconsistent with their ideology..

And that is the real tragedy here.  The fact that, while the WaPo felt it had to invent an entirely new category for Cartoonish Super Lying, they felt no need to create a new term for people who are stupid enough or racist enough or craven enough or cynical enough to go right on believing those Cartoonish Super Lies. 

They're still just "Republicans".

Behold, a Tip Jar!