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No, this is a terrible misreading. You're literally regurgitating this thought from @Quipling's post and projecting it onto something I wrote. De-velocitize yourself.Sorry, Mick, this is weak sauce bothsideism methinks.
Every politician spins the truth in a favorable light... that I think we can acquiesce to. They all probably lied at some point, but we SHOULDN’T accept it, and we should be angry when they are caught.
And there is a BIG difference between the “normal” liar, and the liar who lies so much that his fucking Communications Director has to admit it.
How did I imply that the Trump administration is less deceitful than other administrations? How did I imply that this sort of dishonesty is somehow equal along partisan lines? I did neither. I spoke vaguely towards my disheartened observation that people complain that politicians tell lies, then they deliberately spin up partisan threshers out of political opportunism every time a politician admits this controversial truth.
The Democrats don't truly feel injured, outraged, or appalled by what Hicks said, here. It's just one more opportunity to attack and weaken Trump.
Then you and I have different philosophies about showing your hand. Even in regard to your own people, which I did not specify was the target of these lies (although I accept that this is the implied context), one of the only things Trump said during the campaign I favored was that a President should be ready to be willfully deceptive in his public speech and rhetoric with regard to his intentions on how to rout foreign threats like ISIS, for example. If my President tells me a lie as misdirection of strategy in order to confuse the enemy, I'm okay with it, so long as his actions either way didn't require my consent at that point in the political process. You're not on the campaign trail.I don't.
Another example is when he has to tell a lie to me, publicly, because telling the truth would incense a foreign power, or alienate us on the world stage. For example, let's say Russia is lying about being somewhere in Syria. They're deliberately countering our interests. They're aiding and abetting Syrian forces killing our allies and even threatening our own special forces in that area. They're not where they're supposed to be.
So Trump executes an attack on Russian forces. Putin howls in the international press. He has to play dumb about being there, but he seeks to marshal sympathy that the Americans have committed some act of war against Russia (or the sovereignty of Syria...despite that he himself is meddling in this sovereign affair). Trump plays dumb in the press. I didn't know Russian forces were thereabouts.
After all, Putin is playing dumb that he wasn't where everyone agreed he was supposed to be in this ridiculous proxy war. If Trump admits he attacked Russian forces it escalates things, and possibly opens us to criticism in the U.N., simply because we try to do the right thing and tell the truth, while Putin insulates himself from his misdeeds by simply lying about them: "Prove it". Just like he challenges us to prove Assad gassed Ghouta.
Why would I want my President to tell the truth to me, there, when it promulgates this truth to a judgmental U.N. who is ready to play a willfully naive referee in regard to Russia?
Sometimes politicians tell lies, and it isn't nefarious. It's just strategy. Your proud claim refusing that a lie could ever be told with benevolent intentions, "I don't," reflects a naive absolutism. Dispense with it.
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