Maggie Haberman is getting a bit of blowback in the twittersphere for her failure to call a lie a lie. You can pick up on the conversation here:
http://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1000755597283905537
Her point, if you can call it that, is that if Trump chooses to believe something he spews, it is not necessarily a lie. It seems to me that we can agree on a common sense definition: A lie is a statement of fact that is known to be untrue by the speaker or is uttered with reckless disregard for the truth. If I have no evidentiary foundation for a fact that I assert as true, then I am lying, even if I fervently believe that the fact asserted should be true, or so far as I am concerned it is true, because it is convenient for me to believe it.
If, for instance, I were to say that the crowd at my swearing in ceremony when I became a lawyer was the biggest such crowd in history, I would be lying, even though, having never seen any such crowds before or since, I could argue that, for all I knew, my statement was true. Nonetheless, by the above definition, it would be a lie, and rightly so. Haberman argues that Trump should get a pass if he utters a statement that he may believe, without a shred of evidence, to be true, or that he should get such a pass if he simply can’t tell truth from fiction. In other words, if you’re a pathological liar, you aren’t necessarily lying, you’re just being pathological.
It hardly needs saying that this sort of logic is of the sort that preserves the media tilt toward the right, for, as someone else pointed out, Haberman was not shy about calling Clinton a liar in circumstances far less compelling than those in which she gives Trump a pass.
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