Vrede too wrote: ↑Sun Mar 07, 2021 1:58 pmWho truly was the most dishonest president?
Lots of disturbing and fascinating, to me, details.
George HW Bush - Operation Desert Storm
45SHOLE - At least 30,000 lies on multiple topics
George W Bush - 2nd Gulf War
Lyndon Baines Johnson - Vietnam War +Richard Nixon - Watergate, "No-one in the White House staff, no-one in this Administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident"JFK's brother, Robert Kennedy, once said of LBJ: "He just lies continually about everything. He lies even when he doesn't have to lie.
George Washington - "I can't tell a lie, Pa," was entirely invented by the president's first biographer. Yorktown
Thomas Jefferson - woolly mammothsWilliam Jefferson Clinton - Monica LewinskyIn 1983, President Ronald Reagan claimed he had filmed the atrocities of the Nazi death camps while serving as a US Army Signal Corps photographer in Europe.
He told this story to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir at the White House.
Reagan never left America during World War Two. Few remember this mind-boggling lie.
Many of Trump's comments in the Washington Post catalogue will no doubt prove equally forgettable.
However, one historian argues that the recent tenant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, by the sheer volume of his mendacity, has destroyed the very idea of shared truth in American politics.
"We've tolerated presidential lies ever since the beginning of the republic," says Professor Eric Alterman, author of Lying In State: Why Presidents Lie - And Why Trump Is Worse.
"But Donald Trump is the Frankenstein's monster of a political system that has not merely tolerated lies from our leaders, but has come to demand them."
Prof Alterman says the Capitol rioters, radicalised by conspiracy theories about stolen elections and satanic cabals, underscore the extent to which Trump inspired the "creation of an entire world of unreality".
When presidents misspeak
James Polk - Mexico "has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil"
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1940 - "Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars"Dwight Eisenhower - U-2 spy plane"The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base" - Harry Truman in 1945, but the target was actually a city and most of the 140,000 or so people who died were civilians
Ronald Reagan - Iran-Contra scandal
Barack Obama - "If you like your healthcare plan, you'll keep your healthcare plan, period"
PolitiFact - Lie of the Year: 'If you like your health care plan, you can keep it'O Really wrote: ↑Sun Mar 07, 2021 4:16 pmAs mentioned briefly in the article, some "lies" matter more than others. But it's clear that if the worst they have on Obama is an out of context statement that turned out to be mostly true for most people, then we at least know who the least dishonest President was.
Millions were cancelled and millions more had their plans changed to meet the new requirements. The bigger dishonest whine by the right was over whether we'd keep our doctors. The vast majority of us did.
And if the worst they have on Clinton is Monica, he must have been pretty honest too, although I used to think his worst lie was "I am not a Republican."
FTA:I wouldn't count Ike's U-2 denial as a real lie at all, although technically it is.
Who are we to argue?Dwight Eisenhower approved statements claiming an American U-2 spy plane shot down by the Soviets in 1960 was just a weather research aircraft, later acknowledging this was a lie and his "greatest regret"
Agreed. I think the article could have been a little more clear that Dolt .45 is the worst by far. More than half a million Americans have died as a result.
, for all the replies.
. I hope it's happy dementia.
True, but good on her for attending despite the obvious comparisons.