All politicians lie. All Presidents "lie" or at least "quibble" over words to confuse and mislead in answering hard questions.
I suggested you read this article a couple months ago. It came out Jan/Feb 2017. If you want to win against lies, read it. If you do not care about being manipulated by politicians, not just Tweety, but ALL politicians or surrogates of Tweety or any pol, read it.
"Trump’s Lies vs. Your Brain"
Unfortunately, it’s no contest. Here’s what psychology tells us about life under a leader totally indifferent to the truth.
By Maria Konnikova
January/February 2017
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/donald-trump-lies-liar-effect-brain-214658
"All presidents lie. Richard Nixon said he was not a crook, yet he orchestrated the most shamelessly crooked act in the modern presidency. Ronald Reagan said he wasn’t aware of the Iran-Contra deal; there’s evidence he was. Bill Clinton said he did not have sex with that woman; he did, or close enough. Lying in politics transcends political party and era. It is, in some ways, an inherent part of the profession of politicking. But Donald Trump is in a different category. The sheer frequency, spontaneity and seeming irrelevance of his lies have no precedent. Nixon, Reagan and Clinton were protecting their reputations; Trump seems to lie for the pure joy of it. A whopping 70 percent of Trump’s statements that PolitiFact checked during the campaign were false, while only 4 percent were completely true, and 11 percent mostly true."
Tweety chuckles to himself like his lies are a game and America is unable to sort out what to believe. It is NO WONDER the White House is in disarray. Trust does not exist in the White HOuse.
"What does this mean for the country—and for the Americans on the receiving end of Trump’s constantly twisting version of reality? It’s both a cultural question and a psychological one. For decades, researchers have been wrestling with the nature of falsehood: How does it arise? How does it affect our brains? Can we choose to combat it? The answers aren’t encouraging for those who worry about the national impact of a reign of untruth over the next four, or eight, years. Lies are exhausting to fight, pernicious in their effects and, perhaps worst of all, almost impossible to correct if their content resonates strongly enough with people’s sense of themselves, which Trump’s clearly do." Repititionof lies creates a difficulty for us.
As Tweety lies and the news repeats it, many people start to believe that the words are not lies, but rather they are true!
"Here’s the really bad news for all of those fact-checkers and publications hoping to counter Trump’s false claims: Repetition of any kind—even to refute the statement in question—only serves to solidify it. For instance, if you say, “It is not true that there was voter fraud,” or try to refute the claim with evidence, you often perversely accomplish the opposite of what you want. Later on, when the brain goes to recall the information, the first part of the sentence often gets lost, leaving only the second."
More . . .
"In politics, false information has a special power. If false information comports with preexisting beliefs—something that is often true in partisan arguments—attempts to refute it can actually backfire, planting it even more firmly in a person’s mind."
More . . .
"Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth University who studies false beliefs, has found that when false information is specifically political in nature, part of our political identity, it becomes almost impossible to correct lies."
More . . .
"With regard to Trump specifically, Nyhan points out that claims related to ethno-nationalism—Trump’s declaration early in the campaign that Mexico was sending “rapists” across the border, for instance—get at the very core of who we are as humans, which “may make people less willing or able to evaluate the statement empirically.” If you already believe immigrants put your job at risk, who’s to say the chastity of your daughters isn’t in danger, too?"
More . . . the worst part! Americans can start culturally evolve to a different kind of people than I knew in 1950s. The shining city of the Hill, the symbol of good and equality is diminished.
"Scarier still for those who have never supported Trump is that he just might colonize their brains, too. When we are in an environment headed by someone who lies, so often, something frightening happens: We stop reacting to the liar as a liar. His lying becomes normalized."
Are we becoming the worst elements of the Russia we think we know?
"The dynamic we are seeing unfurled in the United States is not merely hypothetical. We already have a model of this process—a country regressing when its leader goes from progressive to deceptive: Russia under Vladimir Putin. “This worldview”—a zero-sum, I win-you lose one—“is relatively more prevalent in Russia and other cultures with weak rule of law, high corruption and low generalized trust, as compared with Western democracies,” Cushman says. But when Western democracies start looking like those cultures, the norms can quickly shift.
