A couple of times on this blog, I've mentioned a small peeve of mine…when people try to pass typos or one-time spelling errors or innocent verbal gaffes off as lying. We all mistype. We all misspeak. Some of us have errors inserted into what we write by well-meaning autocorrect programs. Back when I worked in Wordstar 4.0, I'd type the name of my best male friend, Sergio Aragonés and even though I diligently put the accent mark on the final "e," it would think I meant "Sergio Arrogant" and change it accordingly.
If a person says something over and over that isn't true, that's different. We've all seen those lists that say Donald Trump lied eighty jillion times. What's amazing about those lists — and what drove the number so high — is that he said most of those things over and over and over and over. Let's say you applied a filter to one of those lists. Let's say you said that Trump would have to say something untrue three separate times before we classified it as a lie as opposed to a verbal gaffe. It would still be a pretty long list.
Glenn Kessler is the main Fact Check person for the Washington Post, which compiled one of those lists. I think he and his paper do a pretty good job of it, This morning, referencing a couple of odd things that came out of Joe Biden's mouth last evening, Kessler posted these six tweets…
Here's a guide for ex-Trump officials for how to tell whether a politician might be telling a deliberate lie or just had a verbal stumble. They were quick to declare Biden was a deliberate "liar" last night on vaccine development. So here we go…
Biden said on CNN: "it's one thing to have the vaccine, which we didn't have when we came into office, but a vaccinator — how do you get the vaccine into someone's arm?" Yep, that's wrong. Sounds bad. But did he mean it?…
A) Did he say something different elsewhere in the town hall? Yes, just minutes before: "We came into office, there was only 50 million doses that were available." That's a clue he knows the vaccine was created when he became president.
B) Is it different than what he said before? Yes, 1/26: "We want to give credit to everyone involved in this vaccine effort and the prior administration and the science community and the medical sphere — for getting the program off the ground. And that credit is absolutely due."
That's another clue. So the odds are this is a flub, not a deliberate falsehood. He contradicts what he said just moments earlier and what he has said in the past. As fact checkers, we look for patterns and context…
I know it's fun to snip a clip and act outraged on social media. But what's more telling is if a politician over and over says the same falsehood, day after day, no matter how often he or she has been fact-checked. No going to mention any names, of course.
I think that's correct…and by the way, I thought it was appropriate to leave in the typos and a bit of awkward phrasing of Mr. Kessler's. For instance, when he wrote "That's a clue he knows the vaccine was created when he became president" in the third tweet, you could deliberately misunderstand what is being said.
You couldn't if Kessler had written "That's a clue he knows the vaccine was created before he became president" or "That's a clue he knows the vaccine was already created when he became president." He probably would have cleaned it up if he'd been writing something to go in the Washington Post instead of up on Twitter.
Trump's tweets (may they rest in peace) were full of spelling mistakes and missing words and bizarre punctuation. I never thought those were lies, just as when someone types "teh" instead of "the," it doesn't mean they're so stupid, they don't know how to spell "the." I don't think obvious verbal gaffes should be spun as lies. It's misleading and it makes outright, real lying seem more like an honest mistake.
And just in case anyone is going to try and make an issue of it, I didn't mean literally that Trump lied eighty jillion times. That was just an attempt at colorful phrasing. The real total was more like ninety skillion.