What is a ‘lie’?
This site is dedicated to documenting the lies told in the pursuit of the presidency of the United States of America. There is arguably no higher office in all the world; no role that wields so much power. The candidates speaking before you, armed with legions of aides, researchers and resources, have a serious responsibility to accurately represent their positions and plans as well as the plans and positions of their opponents.
To that end, we take seriously the use of the word ‘lie’ in reference to this catalogue of deceptions. When a politician makes a point that can be clearly refuted with non-partisan sources, or even better their own words, we call that a lie. Given the claims each campaign has made regarding their own competence and ‘readiness’, we don’t believe there is room for ‘mistakes’ of speech either. So we mark any and all wrong statements as lies.
That may seem hard or unfair, but the office they are pursuing requires a diligence that supersedes the demands of casual conversation. Besides, if they cannot deliver objective truth clearly, with the benefit of preparation and study during a campaign, how could we regard each candidates statement of readiness as anything less than a lie.
Of course, if a candidate or campaign self-corrects, we’ll celebrate by documenting their truth-telling ways. The entry will stand, updated and correct and we’ll remove the tally from their count. If they don’t retract and they let the lie remain on record, then we’ll consider the point well awarded.
Lie vs. Deception
We acknowledge that a lie is just a clumsy form of deception. A skilled politician can be misleading without telling a single outright lie. A limitation of counting lies is that it doesn’t truly gauge a candidate’s honesty or integrity. Nevertheless, the telling of outright lies is controllable by the candidate, and completely unacceptable. We believe it is interesting and important to keep the candidates accountable for their words and inform voters by cataloging and counting these outright lies. An imperfect system to be sure, but certainly a valuable perspective.