All Sins Trump: Dishonesty Edition - Election Day Minus 2

So far we've explored these Trump sins:

• Trump's a birther
• Trump's in favor of war crimes
• Trump's a tax-evader 
• Trump's bragging about his sexual assaults (NSFW) 
• Trump's rampant misogyny

Today, we're looking at something broader though no less dangerous to the republic and to the world: Trump's rampant dishonesty.

Let's start with a very recent frame and work our way inward.  A few days ago this happened:

President Obama on Friday defended the rights of a Donald Trump supporter after a crowd at a rally for Hillary Clinton in North Carolina erupted when the supporter stood up and started shouting.

And then:

The crowd continued to heckle, and Obama continued to urge those shouting to “hold up,” defending the man’s right to free speech.

“First of all, we live in a country that respects free speech,” Obama said. “Second of all, it looks like maybe he might have served in our military and we ought to respect that. Third of all, he was elderly and we got to respect our elders. And fourth of all, don’t boo. Vote!”

And this is how Trump told the story:

He was talking to the protester — screaming at him, really screaming at him. By the way, if I spoke the way Obama spoke to that protester, they would say, 'He became unhinged! He became —' You have to go back and look and study. And see what happened. They never moved the camera. And he spent so much time screaming at this protester and, frankly, it was a disgrace.

There is no way around it.  Nothing of what Trump said was true.  If he didn't know that, he should have. His dishonesty throughout his campaign is either active or passive.  He knows and lies or he should have known and doesn't care about the truth.

But we've seen this going as far back as this lie:

I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.

Politifact said that wasn't just untrue it was "Pants on Fire" untrue.  That was late November 2015 and he's yet to correct himself.

In a similar story, there's this:

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump said Tuesday that Muslims knew a radicalized couple planned to launch the December terrorist attack on a county workers’ holiday party in San Bernardino, California, but refused to notify authorities.

Trump has repeated the claim to thousands of supporters at campaign rallies and, most recently, on live television during a presidential town hall interview on CNN.

“In San Bernardino people knew what was going on,” Trump told Anderson Cooper on Tuesday. “They had bombs on the floor. Many people saw this, many, many people. Muslims living with them, in the same area, they saw that house. They saw that.”

There is, however, no evidence to suggest this claim is true.

The Star, a Canadian newspaper, has collected a yuge list of Trump's lies.  They cover a wide array of topics.  Here's one:

7. Groping allegations

“Many of them have now already been debunked.” — Oct. 18

Nothing could be further from the truth. None of the allegations against Trump have been definitely disproven, although Trump and his surrogates have offered rebuttals. (One of Trump’s favourites: questioning the attractiveness of the accuser.)

Yet allegations that he has sexually imposed himself on women have been around for decades, as has his history of misogynistic comments.

His former wife Ivana once accused him of marital rape, though she said she did not mean it in a “literal or criminal” sense after their divorce was settled.

The allegations came out after the release of a 2005 video in which Trump bragged it was easy to grope women — “Grab them by the p---y. You can do anything.”

Oh, those Canadians. So polite. The word they partially blanked out was "pussy." It means "vagina" in porn-speak.

The list, sadly and irritatingly, goes on and on (he just keeps on trying...) .

But I can hear my vast right wing audience claim that it's Hillary who's dishonest.  What about that, Dayvoe?  Huh?  What about that one??

Luckily, Nicholas Kristoff wrote about this a few months ago:

If deception were a sport, Trump would be the Olympic gold medalist; Clinton would be an honorable mention at her local Y.

Let’s investigate.

One metric comes from independent fact-checking websites. As of Friday, PolitiFact had found 27 percent of Clinton’s statements that it had looked into were mostly false or worse, compared with 70 percent of Trump’s. It said 2 percent of Clinton’s statements it had reviewed were egregious “pants on fire” lies, compared with 19 percent of Trump’s. So Trump has nine times the share of flat-out lies as Clinton.

Likewise, The Washington Post Fact-Checker has awarded its worst ranking, Four Pinocchios, to 16 percent of Clinton’s statements that it checked and to 64 percent of Trump’s.

“Essentially, Clinton is in the norm for a typical politician,” says Glenn Kessler, who runs Fact-Checker, while Trump “is just off the charts. There’s never been anyone like him, at least in the six years I have been doing this.”

And so it goes.

I'll end this post, as I have done for all the others, with a question to my Senator, Pat Toomey.  Pat, I realize you've come out publicly and denounced Trump in any number of ways.  You also have yet to say that you can't vote for this bigoted, dishonest, tax-evading fan of war crimes.  Why the heck not?

What else do you need to know, Pat?  What else would it take to get you to say publicly that  he's simply not worthy of your vote?

Your silence on the matter, I fear, tells us a great deal about your own character.

Something for all Pennsylvania voters to think about on Tuesday.