Joe Biden and the Fine Art of Political Lying
How politicians pull the wool over our eyes.
by E. Donald Elliott
November 21, 2021, 11:45 PM
“How do you know a politician is lying?” “His or her lips are moving.” Lying in politics is as American as motherhood and apple pie — and by that cliché I mean no disrespect for other kinds of what the Biden Administration calls “birthing people.” There are even some federal and state Supreme Court cases that could be read as saying that politicians have a “right to lie” that is protected by the Constitution.
Back when he thought of himself as a business person, Donald Trump and a ghostwriter wrote a best-seller entitled The Art of the Deal. It was pretty good. I read it and learned a few things about negotiating. But that’s not the topic of this column. The current point is that Joe Biden should write a sequel to Trump’s book entitled The Art of the Political Lie. There are already a number of good books and articles about the art and science of lying generally including the 1954 classic How to Lie with Statistics. But no one has written specifically about why political lies are so effective, and so this column attempts to begin to fill that gap. Its purpose is not to help politicians do a better job of lying; they don’t need any help in that department. Rather, the purpose is to help those of us who are the targets of the lies of politicians to be better able to recognize them and be on our guard against them.
Those who are looking for “red meat” about how Biden is a bigger liar than Trump, or Trump is a bigger liar than Biden, should stop reading right now. Comparing political liars is not my topic today. My topic is how they do it, and why lying is a such successful strategy in American politics. Joe Biden has never been much of a success in office, but he is a past master at politics, including the fine art of using political lies to get reelected, and consequently many of the examples below are of Biden lies.
Rule One: Avoid Verifiable Statements of Fact.
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