I gotcher false equivalency for ya
by digby
This from Think Progress shows just how insane this need to provide “balance” really is:
Over the weekend, various major media outlets discovered that Donald Trump lies a lot.
“Never in modern presidential politics has a major candidate made false statements as routinely as Trump has,” the LA Times reported.
“Donald J. Trump has unleashed a blizzard of falsehoods, exaggerations and outright lies in the general election, peppering his speeches, interviews and Twitter posts with untruths so frequent that they can seem flighty or random — even compulsive,” wrote the New York Times.
Politico had a worthy plan to evaluate Trump’s truthfulness. It decided to track the public statements of both candidates for one week and compare them.
That exercise found that Trump says something false every 3 minutes and 15 seconds while Clinton utters a falsehood every 12 minutes.“Compared with Trump’s machine-gun style of spewing falsehoods, Clinton’s detours from the truth were rarer and more targeted,” Politico concluded.
But dig a little deeper and you’ll see that Politico went to extreme lengths to create even this level of equivalency between Trump and Clinton.
One of Clinton’s eight “lies” is her claim that Donald Trump’s plan to eliminate the estate tax would be a $4 billion tax cut for his family. Politico argues that this is a lie because it is based on Donald Trump’s own estimate of his net worth.
In other words, Clinton is guilty of lying because she took Trump at his word about his own net worth. It’s not enough for Clinton to tell the truth and to accurately describe the impact of his estate tax plan. She also has to identify and correct Trump’s lies.
Trump’s actual net worth cannot be independently determined because, among other things, Trump has not released his tax returns.