Blatant Lies/Real Life/Politics

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


This Doesn't Concern Blatant Lies in Politics Or War At All

Politics is built on lying. As Adolf Hitler is quoted as saying,[1] "great masses of people fall to a great lie much easier than to a small one". Really, it's hard to find politicians who don't use blatant lies, as evidenced by all of the major scandals and hypocrisy going on . There is an expectation that politicians that don't represent big parties don't lie, but it's as wrong as anything else; take a look at British politics, where Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is so vilified for breaking a promise, you'd think he'd actually invented lying.

Australia

  • "There will never, ever be a GST".[context?]

Canada

  • At least one politician decided to tell people things were getting better during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic when things were actually getting worse. In Ontario, Canada: October 6: "We are flattening the curve" (the daily average was 611 new cases); October 28: "We see the curve going down" (as the daily average neared 900); December 15: "Because of the guidelines we put in … we're seeing a plateau per se" (the daily average was 1,927 cases).

China

  • Even with hundreds of images and videos of it circulating the Internet today, the Chinese government denies the Tiananmen Square massacre ever happened.

Germany

  • The NPD, the German Nationalist Party (who totally aren't admitted Neo-Nazis). It's not like they organise Skinhead-marches, propose mainly anti-democratic edicts, promise even the most extreme of popularist actions ("Kill the paedophiles!"), attend WW 2 re-enactments dressed as Axis forces, engage "former" street brawlers and terrorists as candidates, strive to expel Islamic religion from Germany, plan to cut the funds for Jewish communities once elected, attend murals and honour guards of SS-, SA- and other fanatical Nazi organisations' members (as well as the birth and death days of well-known Nazis) throughout Europe, and hide the questions "An out-fashioned German first name with 5 letters", "The abbreviation for National Socialism", "Famous politician of the 20th century, also known as the 'Peace Pilot'[2]" in the crossword puzzles of their party papers. Or do they?
  • "Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten."[3] Said by East-German Politician Walter Ulbricht in June 1961. Two months later, the Berlin Wall was built.
    • This was also a Suspiciously Specific Denial, because while border tensions, in general, were being discussed, nobody in the conversation mentioned a wall until Ulbricht did. In any case, this quote was later attached to the wall itself whilst under construction for extra hilarity.

Iraq

  • During the 2003 US Invasion of Iraq, Iraqi information minister Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf (a.k.a. "Baghdad Bob" or "Comical Ali") became famous for statements like "The cruise missiles do not frighten anyone. We are catching them like fish in a river." or "There are no Americans in Baghdad." (while an Abrams is rolling down the block on the screen behind him).
    • And before that, "Baghdad Betty" tries to use this to demoralize American soldiers in the 1990 war. Hilarity Ensues.[4]

Liberia

  • Charles D.B. King, president of Liberia, claimed a landslide victory of 234,000 votes from an electorate of 15,000 voters. No, those numbers aren't reversed. He set the record for the most crooked election of all time.

Libya

  • Most of what deposed Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi said. Two particularly memorable examples come to mind: He claimed "My people love me" while opening Libya to international journalists, saying this while protests were wracking the country, army units were turning against him, and he's basically making his image worse even as he tries to make it better. Also, his suggestion that the rebels are actually drunk/hallucinating/Al-Qaeda/American/Israeli/Zionist/terrorist/mercenary/imperialists who are all high. Of course, none of those labels contradicts each other whatsoever.

Mexico

  • In Mexico, 1968, students were accused of being communists. The reality? The U.S.A.'s chief of the C.I.A. in Mexico, Winston Scott reported daily of the "Communist threat", yet there was no proof of that. He reported poorly and ordered an investigation to see if Chinese, Cuban, or Soviet agents were behind the plot and were giving the students weapons (which they would've used against the army in the Tlatelolco Massacre). You can pretty much guess what happened.

North Korea

  • In general, any country that has "people's" or "democratic" in its name isn't. North Korea, possessing what is generally considered the most oppressive government on the planet, has the official name of Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
  • Underneath the Korean Demilitarized Zone, at least four tunnels large enough to file a division of soldiers through per hour have been discovered with their entrances on the North Korean side. The North claims they were digging for coal, but no coal has ever been found through those tunnels (which have been dug through granite), and the tunnels were even painted black to give the appearance of coal. Further, these tunnels run north to south, have no branches and are sloped upward as it moves south so that standing water doesn't form within them and stagnate.

Philippines

  • Joseph Estrada's ads need special mention. A former Philippine president who had been proven to have been stealing money, tried to declare martial law, was forcefully impeached then imprisoned, and as of this writing, is now currently running for the position of President of the Republic of the Philippines for 2010 with the tag line "I didn't finish my presidency".

Turkey

Venezuela

  • The infamous "Hugo Chávez arrived on his own foot at the Caracas Military Hospital" government statement merely days before his death in early March 2013, when he has been so sick he didn't attend his own inauguration ceremony in January and the presidential elections that preceded said inauguration was advanced to October 2012 instead of the traditional December because his illness was progressing too fast for Chavez to have a traditional re-election campaign.

USA

  • Politifact is built on the premise that politicians lie and sets out to fact check most notable statements, and the most blatant lies tend to be graded as "pants on fire". It even won the 2009 Pulitzer for it. There are, however, questions of bias: from the right, as Republicans are graded as lying three times more than Democrats; and from the left, for trying to bring those to parity when there may not be an equivalence.
    • Of note was Jon Kyl's "not intended to be a factual statement" about Planned Parenthood's abortion services (he claimed 90%, when it's actually 3%) was not as bad as the Democrats claiming that Republican proposals would add $12,500 to Medicare (it's actually $6,250).
    • This reached to their 2011 Lie of the Year: Democrats claiming that "Republicans voted to end Medicare", which was immediately criticised from both sides; the staunchly conservative National Review) that a) it can be argued that the plan effectively ended Medicare as it's known, and b) it was pure campaign material and couldn't be dismissed simply as a lie because of the previous point.
  • Any time any politician promises to do something (cut costs/taxes or raise growth or level of services) for nothing. They might even be sorta honest, in the sense that they're also lying to themselves that they can do it for more than a few years before things increase again. That said, it's worth noting that many of the things politicians say that seem like Blatant Lies in hindsight aren't technically lies. This is due to the fact that politicians have a habit of making hasty promises to secure voter support, then realizing later that they had misjudged the situation. For example, George H. W. Bush ran on "no new taxes", but was forced to do so to control the deficit, and cost him a second term.
    • An article in US News & World Report during the 1988 election said that despite their promises, whoever won (Bush or Dukakis) would have to raise taxes despite his promise. Bush replied in a letter to the magazine stating that he definitely would not raise taxes.
  • Richard Nixon: "I'm not a crook. I earned everything I've got."
  • Senator John Kyl claimed abortion accounted for 99% of Planned Parenthood's services on the floor of the Senate while trying to push through a budget plan to defund it. When called out on this, his office gave a press release that indicated his rant was "not intended to be a factual statement", especially as Planned Parenthood's balance sheet showed helping people with STDs, counselling, and contraception being a bigger focus for the company.
  • While travelling to Argentina to visit his mistress (whom he later proclaimed his soul mate), going off the grid for days at a time and using government funds and transportation to do so, former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford claimed that he was "hiking the Appalachian Trail". For added hilarity, during the alleged hiking days, it was a highly-popularized nude hike.
  • Following the killing of Osama Bin Laden, former Bush Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, when asked if waterboarding or other Enhanced Interrogation Techniques used on captured insurgents led to Bin Laden's killing, he simply denied that waterboarding was ever done. The next day, he said waterboarding was vital in ascertaining the information.
  • Bill Clinton: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."
  • "My Twitter account was hacked" (Anthony Weiner)
  • Sarah Palin didn't misspeak. Paul Revere really did ride to warn the British to not away Americans' guns.
  • The ever popular "It's George Bush's fault", which has been used by many a politician for everything from the attempted Time Square bombing to the BP Oil Spill to Osama bin Laden hiding out in Pakistan. Granted, Boy George wasn't exactly the greatest of Presidents, but come on, it's 2016 and the phrase is still tossed around!
    • Blaming the previous government isn't a new concept though: while Bush still was in office there was a bit of "It's Clinton's fault" years after he left office, and the current ruling coalition in Britain use Labour's responsibility for the (strength of the) recession as a shield against criticism in the same way.
    • Regardless of its truth or falsity with regards to Bush or Clinton, blaming the previous politician or administration is at least sometimes justified. Newly enacted laws and policies can take many years to start showing their full range of both intended results and unintended consequences, often several years after the person who promoted and signed the law has left office.
    • Many inconveniences and general irritations of Americans were created by George W. Bush. For instance, the TSA has overtaken "airline food" as the ubiquitous air-travel related target of comedians. The person who created TSA was... George W. Bush /spoiler. Of course people are still going to be kicking his name around.
  • Donald Trump made over 20,000 false or misleading claims as President of the United States as of July 2020, according to fact-checkers at The Washington Post. And he continued to do so in the months leading up to the 2020 election, including repeated claims that the COVID-19 pandemic was "almost over" and didn't affect anyone "important". This latter was promptly abandoned when he himself tested positive for COVID-19 in October 2020.
  1. ↑ he actually lifted it from an old army manual
  2. ↑ Rudolph Hess
  3. ↑ "Nobody has the intention to build a wall."
  4. ↑ Bart Simpson? Orly?
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Blatant_Lies/Real_Life/Politics?oldid=1990040"