Monday, August 01, 2016

Hillary Clinton Is Unusually Honest For An American Politician

Drum has the killer graphic, as usual.

posted by Winston Smith at 9:41 PM

4 Comments:

Blogger The Mystic said...

I found that graphic a while back, too, and posted it myself, but I think it's worth noting that this is derived from the set of assertions scrutinized by Politifact. Their method for selecting assertions to scrutinize is to identify those assertions which appear to most impact the public discourse (so those which are most frequently cited, or repeated, or discussed).

So, it might be too big of a leap to say she's unusually honest overall. What we can say, it seems, is something more like:

"When you hear someone repeat one of Clinton’s statements, you can expect a 27% chance that it is at least misleading and a 12% chance that it is outright false."

And you can compare that to Trump:

"When you hear someone repeat one of Trump’s statements, you can expect a 75% chance that it is at least misleading, and a whopping 59% chance that it is outright false."

(https://bluehatrecord.wordpress.com/2016/07/20/americas-crippled-political-discourse-and-the-trump-phenomenon/)

10:38 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Wow.

Nice work.

I am shamed by my relative shitposting.

11:13 AM  
Blogger The Mystic said...

You know, the graphic might even be evidence for the observation that HRC is being dogged over non-issues while Trump says WTFever. Assuming Politifact is doing a good job in identifying statements most relevant to the focus of our public discourse (and I know of no evidence indicating they are ignoring HRC's more important assertions or anything like that), this data might say instead that public scrutiny on Trump tends to uncover lies whereas public scrutiny on HRC tends not to.

And, of course, despite this, a dangerously large segment of the American populace believes Trump to be a comparable candidate. That's in line with my hypothesis in the afore-linked post that the Republicans have succeeded in pushing their unfalsifiable Dems-are-treacherous-liars position on a public which will disregard data to the contrary in favor of the now-ingrained dogma.

Seems right to me...

12:24 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Good points.

Somebody should take pre-designated samples--something like: the next twenty significant assertions made by each candidate starting Wednesday at noon. Then evaluate those. That would help wash out some complicating factors.

12:36 PM  

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