Mark Twain wrote a short paper entitled “On the Decay of the Art of Lying”. If he could observe politics in this day and age ….

“In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”
– Autobiography of Mark Twain

Wanting to examine some data about messages shared by politicians, I went to Politifact’s WEB site last December. I compiled the aggregate ratings for each leader (and Internet emails).

Ranking the best and worst in categories, Mr. Obama scored best, Mr. Boehner was 2nd followed by Mr. Biden in 3rd. The two Senate leaders came next and were tied. The worst score for an individual was Ms. Pelosi.

Of course, Internet chain emails were far and away the absolute worst score and led the percent of the worst rating available “Pants of Fire” false – which is not surprising because there is little to no accountability for their messages. OVER 91% of the rated Internet communiques had, at best, half-truths !!!! Given these stats, why do so many people fall for this stuff????

More important to me than the individual ratings is the fact that the BEST score for communiques with some false within them was almost 69% !!! Since this is an undesired rating, the lowest score is the best.

Also, the best score for the half-truth and worse rating was slightly over 53% !!!!

So the BAD NEWS is that at their best, communications from these politicians contained some falsity almost 69% of the time and at their best, over 53% contained half-truths or worse!!!!

Half truths might be the most effective of all – they have some truth that people recognize and accept as true and then they very well assume that the entire message is true.

Worse than that is that we, the electorate fall for this stuff !!!

….. and my following of the campaigns so far this year indicates to me that it has only gotten worse. Last night Mr. Ryan led people to believe that an auto plant in his state was closed because of Mr. Obama’s policies or failure to do what he said he would do – and the fact is that the decision to close the plant was made before Mr. Obama was elected !!!! I suspect we will hear similar crud from next week’s Dem convention.

Is this OK? Is this what we want?

If not, how can the electorate unite and hold politicians and their supporters to a higher standard?