Calculating the exaggerations, flip-flops and lies from Thursday night's presidential debate might take weeks. Republican candidate Donald Trump still reigns as the modern-day king of deception. He continues to lie about the 2020 election being stolen from him.
Trump once told a whopper about "close to 5,000" impersonators in Georgia casting ballots for dead people. A state investigation uncovered but four absentee ballots from voters who had died, all submitted by relatives. The Washington Post's fact-checking staff wrote a book about Trump's deceit during his term in the White House.
Maybe because Trump murdered the truth most days, authors of the book settled on a redundant subtitle: The President's Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies . History will be unkind to Trump, just as it has been to fellow liars Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Nixon ran a criminal enterprise from the White House, all the while blaming the Washington Post for writing about it.
Clinton survived lying about his pursuit of a female intern. Americans in the late 1990s had more tolerance for sexual harassment, even when the perpetrator was the country's most powerful man and his target was a 22-year-old woman who'd landed in strange and awesome surroundings. Clinton got off easy.
Still, he suffered more than John F. Kennedy, whose lies often are downplayed or ignored. I suspect this is because most of us have watched Kennedy's assassination on the Zapruder film, and we aren't disposed to thi.
