I am borrowing Pinocchio from Fact Checker, the Washington Post’s column that investigates statements made by politicians and others. Their fibs are graded on a scale of one to five Pinocchios, on a sliding scale of egregiousness. I began wondering how this ranking works.
Some fibs are simply innocuous. Falsely attributing statements to Yogi Berra or Mark Twain fits here. Well, they would have said that if they’d thought of it. It makes a better story than to attribute something to, say, Wendell Wilkie. These get no Pinocchios.
Other fibs are fairly harmless, usually meant to puff the teller’s ego a bit. “This is my natural hair color,” or “I still wear a size 10” fit here. These are so obviously false they don’t need a Pinocchio. I have a friend who lies about her zip code, to make her friends think she lives in a better neighborhood, I guess.
Some fibs are better than others. “The dog ate my homework” is better than “I’m not talking with my mouth full,” because the former is harder to verify. Telling your doctor that nothing hurts (when something does) is as dumb as exaggerating your income to the I.R.S, self-defeating. Poor fibbers get no respect, which is what politicians can’t understand. These merit at least one Pinocchio, even if no one believes them.
Crank it up a notch to “There is no such thing as evolution, (global warming, hard-working poor people, etc.)” and Pinocchios stack up. Even if the speaker thinks they are true, he hasn’t bothered to check available sources. He is speaking out of ignorance to influence people to trust him to tell the truth.
The worst are the real mean fibs, which deserve to be elevated to lies. They are meant to mislead others about something important. This class of whoppers is called fraud, and gets into the category of crime, not just “Oops, I must of misspoke.” Politicians who step over this line deserve to be tarred and feathered, not applauded or elected. Even Pinocchio would be appalled at what we’re hearing in the run-up to elections.
1 comment:
The evolution deniers are for the most part, coming at this subject from a religious point of view. Either they have this biblical belief that the world was created in 7 days, people and dinosaurs coexisted, the earth is only 10,000 years old, or they believe that they will curry favor from people who really do believe this non-sense. In my view this disqualifies the current crop of republican candidates, from serving in any higher office. On the other hand the global warming deniers (most acknowledge the warming part but deny that human activity has any role to play) fall into two groups. On one hand there are a few who really believe this phenomena is part of some natural cycle, but I believe the larger group know that human activity is a forcing function in the warming process, but cannot admit this fact because to admit this human role, is to give Governments cause to act, and conservatives can't permit that.
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