Quote:
Originally Posted by
noonwitch
What Dan Rather did was wrong, and he ruined a long and distinguished career with his lie.
Which he continues to defend. Since then, we've seen his tactics multiplied. The selective editing of input has become a staple of the Praetorian press. On this very subject, The New Republic presented a Photoshopped photo of Obama with a shotgun as a factual rebuttal to the accusation of lying, i.e., presenting a second lie to cover up the first, and then they followed that up by blaming Twitter. This is Stalinist manipulation, and I'd expect it from the KGB, but not from the press of a free country, or at least one that wanted it to remain a free country.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
noonwitch
I don't consider the Benghazi thing to be a deliberate lie. Whether the motive was "I hate America" or some stupid internet movie, it's still terrorism. There were attacks on other embassies at the time that were motivated by the stupid movie. It took a week to get through all the data and intelligence involved.
Hardly. The personnel on the ground in Benghazi were in contact with the US throughout the firefight. They, and their superiors, knew that mortars and other heavy weapons don't just spontaneously appear in protests. We also now know that the compound where the fight took place wasn't a consulate, but a CIA compound, which raises several questions about their mission there. The simultaneous attacks were the result of al Qaeda coordinating multiple engagements on the anniversary of 9/11, in order to make the point that they were still combat effective despite Bin Laden's death. Many of the jihadis who attacked the Benghazi compound were later engaged in the Algerian Oil Refinery attack, which also resulted in American deaths, and some are in Mali, assisting in the consolidation of a new Islamist state which will provide staging areas for attacks throughout the region. The motive for the attack is therefore highly significant, since it is the difference between a spontaneous uproar over trivia and a series of planned and deliberate attacks on the United States.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
noonwitch
I also don't think the comments, in full context, about skeet shooting at Camp David are a lie. If you take the first answer without context, which is what your side always does, then yes, it appears to be a lie. But if you look at the whole thing, it's not. He used "we" in the first answer, then clarified later that it wasn't his kids, it was guests.
You have learned your Clintonian parsing well. Yes, if you slice the salami finely enough, you can almost evade the obvious falsehood, but it takes a very thin blade. In context, he did use the term "we", which would include him, and he said that "we" do it "all the time". Now, in my mind, "we" includes the speaker, as in, someone else and I, as opposed to a group which does not include the speaker, which would normally be referred to as "they". This is where Daffy Duck was say that we are having pronoun trouble. Obama used "we" to imply that when his friends shot skeet at Camp David, he did as well. The second part of Obama's statement was that he and his friends shot skeet "all of the time". Now, while one can take this to mean anything from fairly often to constantly, it does not apply to a one-time action, unless it is continuous, so if Obama has only shot skeet once, but that began the weekend of his inaugural and continued through today without a break, one could say that this singular occurance was "all of the time", and it would not be a stretch, but clearly, Obama has not been shooting skeet nonstop since he took office (unlike, say, golf). So, the question is, did he actually shoot with any regularity? For that, we go back to the OP, which includes the following statement:
“The only time he shot skeet was for President’s Cup,” said the source, referring to a shooting competition tradition involving the presidential Marine guards. “I was there. He stayed for about five minutes, and couldn’t leave fast enough.”
So, a one-time, five minute exposure to shooting would not constitute something done "all of the time", unless, of course, you are playing Clintonian games with the language.
BTW, the definition of "is": verb 1. 3rd person singular present indicative of be.
1. to exist or live: Shakespeare's “To be or not to be” is the ultimate question. 2. to take place; happen; occur: The wedding was last week.
3. to occupy a place or position: The book is on the table.
4. to continue or remain as before: Let things be.
5. to belong; attend; befall: May good fortune be with you.
You Clintonistas seemed to have a problem with that.
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Originally Posted by
noonwitch
Deliberate lies are things like lying about a blow job,
Not to mention suborning perjury, obstructing justice and using taxpayer-funded jobs to buy off mistresses. Those are not just lies, but felonies, or, as the Constitution calls the, "high crimes."
Quote:
Originally Posted by
noonwitch
pretending a leader of another nation has weapons that he does not have to justify invading his country and deposing him,
Except that the leader of the other nation had used those weapons in previous wars, the previous administration made the same claims to his having them (and bombed him for it) and, oh yeah, he did have uranium:
The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program — a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium — reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.
The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" — the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment — was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.
What's now left is the final and complicated push to clean up the remaining radioactive debris at the former Tuwaitha nuclear complex about 12 miles south of Baghdad — using teams that include Iraqi experts recently trained in the Chernobyl fallout zone in Ukraine.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/25546334/n...-uranium-iraq/
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Originally Posted by
noonwitch
having your campaign officials hire people to break into your opponent's office for the purposes of installing illegal surveillence equipment then lying to Congress when asked about it.
The second part of that statement is true, Nixon did lie about Watergate after the fact, but he was never proven to have authorized the break-ins or wiretaps.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
noonwitch
Then there's Iran-Contra: secretly selling weapons to a terrorist nation to raise funds to arm an army of drug-dealing nun killers because they were allegedly fighting communists in between slaughtering villages of civilians and smuggling cocaine into the United States, then telling Congress "I forgot" at the hearings on the matter.
Wow. Now who is playing with the truth? First, the Reagan administration sold a limited number of anti-armor weapons to Iran, in order to attempt to secure the release of American hostages in Lebanon (you libs always forget that part), while providing Saddam with satellite intel that allowed him to maneuver his armor around the Iranian forces (which negated the value of the weapons, and kept the two most anti-American regimes in the region locked in combat with each other for a decade). Second, you repeat every propaganda claim about the Contras, but let's remember that the Sandinistas were in the process of installing a totalitarian communist state in Central America. The Contras ended up winning power in the first fair election that the Sandinistas ran, despite their efforts at ACORN-style repression. Do you really think that the people of Nicaragua would have voted for what you described?
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Originally Posted by
noonwitch
How many people died because Clinton lied about a blow job?
How many died because his SECDEF wouldn't provide armor to the commanders on the ground in Mogadishu? How many died because he wouldn't take out Bin Laden when he had the opportunity? How many people died when his AG barbecued the Branch Davidian compound and then lied about literally everything regarding the siege and subsequent assault.
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Originally Posted by
noonwitch
How many people died because GWB and his administration lied about Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction?
None. He didn't lie.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
noonwitch
How many people died because Reagan sold weapons to Iran? How many people died because the DEA at the time was instructed by Reagan administration officials to look the other way when the Contras smuggled cocaine into this country, while at the same time, Reagan was fighting the so called war on drugs and incarcerating american citizens for far lesser drug crimes.
Well, lots of Iranians and Iraqis died, but that was because we kept them fighting, which was actually a good thing. The cocaine fantasy is one of the left's big lies, but again, we are rehashing this.
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Originally Posted by
noonwitch
Politicians lie-they all do, on both sides. Your guys are no more righteous than my guys.
Politicians do lie, but there are legitimate and illegitimate reasons to lie. A legitimate reason would be to weaken enemies of the United States and attempt to secure the release of Americans held hostage. An illegitimate reason would be to avoid the consequences of personal conduct, fix a court case (such as the Paula Jones lawsuit), obscure the facts surrounding a foreign policy debacle which will continue to have profound implications for our security in order to win an election or simply to create the impression that someone is something that he is not, such as a shooter of skeet, in order to feign credibility with opponents while undermining Constitutional protections.
The claim that "they all do it" is a crock, that simply lowers the bar for all politicians. And the fact is that while many of them do lie, we can always count on Democrats not to care when the lie is told by a Democrat, no matter how much that lie insults our intelligence, or how base the motives of the liar are.