I would have loved to incorporate more earlier Presidents, but before TV and radio we only have their written statements to go on. Let me know if you have any quotes from earlier Presidents which are a clear and direct lie!
Really? You're counting the Bull Moose quip as a lie? Really? Claiming to have nothing to do with Panama declaring independence from Colombia might qualify as an actual lie. Certainly not the Bull Moose joke.
Lincoln could possibly be added to the list for the at best misinformation and at worst a lie in there somewhere: https://time.com/5896683/lincoln-civil-war-misinformation/
I haven't bought the book :) also tricky one because the author wasn't trying to present an unbiased account of events, there was a clear focus on the theme of the book as per the title.
Lincoln also lied when he wrote an op ed to Horace Greeley to publish for his Herald Tribune in August 1862 saying that he hadn’t decided to free the slaves yet, when we know from a cabinet meeting he had one month earlier in July that he decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and have it become law if the South did not surrender before January 1st, 1863. In fact, he’d only decided to wait to issue the preliminary Emancipation because his Secretary of State, William H. Seward, convinced him to wait for a military victory. That would come in September at Antietam. One month after the op-ed.
I’m not judging him for this artful lie - he is my favorite and, I believe, the best president - just saying he wasn’t entirely honest when he acted as if his mind wasn’t made up yet when we know it was. He also lied again when he said he didn’t know there was a Confederate peace mission sent by Jefferson Davis in the winter of 1865, using artful language like, ‘As far as I know.’
I was actually having a conversation about this with a lawyer friend of mine a couple months ago. He was making the argument that the elephant and donkey should be classified as religions, and once that happens they could be stripped of a lot of their power and funding, since the anti-establishment clause would force their fundraising to be removed from IRS tax returns. It was a fun rabbit-hole to go down, even if it's not likely.
A complicit media helps many of them, and they work for the bankers, Fed Reserve, CFR, Trilateral Commission, Vatican, globalists, and Israel. If you cross too many of those cabals, you can't even be president, and most are related to royals or elites. JFK was the last serious president who tried to cross the deep state elites, and you see how that went. None of them are ever held accountable for anything. The president is just the tip of the iceberg, being pressured or rewarded by the families who actually control most levers of power.
McKinley has a few things that you could include. One thing that would be appropriate is, "...there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them...". This is humorously stupid and untrue since the Philippines were already extremely Christian, making the justification of Christianizing this poor heathen nation a total lie. And since it's about taking over the Philippines, it's a good hint to who would be the answer.
McKinley was also anti-war/imperialism, basing it on his nightmarish experiences serving in the Civil War, until it was advantageous for America to fight the Spanish-American War and to take possession of places like Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Then he was Mr. Imperialist.
He actually dragged his feet in his opponents’ point of view. American public sentiment was more sympathy for Cuba than anything else, and I bet that’s why McKinley wanted war with Spain. I bet he was left with a bitter taste in his mouth from taking their colonies instead of giving them independence.
How about Washington's quote 'it is impossible to govern the world without God'. A number of European countries have been doing so pretty well for quite a while now.
Ah this is such a refreshing quiz. Reminds me that all politics is a bit of a sham so all the party tribalism is even stupider. Short live all presidents LOL
Great quiz. Some of these, though, are less lies, I would say, than broken promises (e.g. the FDR & HW Bush quotes). And, seriously, how can there be a quiz of lies by US presidents and not have "“I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!” ?!
Easy. Some of these were reaching, to call them "lies," though.
The Biden quote is basically true. It's like saying "don't buy a lottery ticket. You're not going to win." Is this true for the large majority of people hearing it? Yes. For everyone? Maybe not. Does that make it a "lie." Not my any reasonable definition of the word.
In the case of the Obama and Bush Sr. quotes, I think they were probably intended to be true, but, later, political realities set in beyond their direct control.
In Nixon's case, I don't think he was lying in this particular instance so much as expressing his own psychopathy. A better one for him might have been "I am not a crook."
and finally in the case of Teddy Roosevelt... that was more boast than lie, obviously... and... I'm not sure that one wasn't also true.
The Biden one is not true. "You're not going to get covid if you have these vaccinations." At the time he said that, it was already well known in the scientific community that immunity wore off within weeks or maybe months. It was also popular knowledge that the vaccine (as any vaccine is) was not quite 100% effective. It was also very widely known among the medical and scientific communities that SARS-CoV-2 was very rapidly mutating, and that the first identified mutations were in the spike proteins, meaning that the virus was almost certain to mutate its way around the vaccine. If someone like you or I said that, it'd be one thing, but the president, who has millions of dollars per year worth of medical and scientific advisors has no such excuse. He clearly said what he said to get people to take their vaccines, and, at the time, it was not even known that vaccines would be as effective as they are at long term severe symptom prevention. That's why it's a misleading statement.
Maybe try rereading what I already wrote. Not even close to being a lie. Not 100% accurate? Sure. Those are different things. I would evaluate this statement as mostly true. Non-partisan fact-checkers Politifact rank it as "half true".
In today's political climate there is no such thing as "nonpartisan". I have never believed in fact checkers, and I never will. It's pretty much the soft term for governmental acceptance check. Government approved facts are also known as propaganda in the rest of the world. The real and only true fact checkers should be the people of the country only. Not some corporation dedicated to fact checking alone in which we have no knowledge who pays them to even do it.
Yeah, I read what you wrote. You are saying that the untrue statement was actually true, which is incorrect. I suggest you do a little research. I don't care what political pundits say about anything vaguely scientific, regardless of how partisan or not they are. A covid vaccine never was believed by the medical community, nor the scientific community (both of which advise Biden) to be 100% protection against covid, which is what Biden claimed. It's not some sort of loophole or technicality, it's flat out about what he intended when he said what he said and how untruthful he understood it to be at the time he said it. Maybe there's some wiggle room in his intent, but there's a ton of evidence that points strongly to his intent being to manipulate.
Any person or organisation who does not self-identify as having an allegiance to a political party can call themselves non-partisan. No fact-checker is going to declare an allegiance to a political party if they want to be believed, and this does not make an arbitrary ranking system that uses such subjective descriptors as "half-true" any more objective.
The Bush Sr. one is certainly a lie. Take the context into account: "And I'm the one who will not raise taxes. My opponent now says he'll raise them as a last resort, or a third resort. But when a politician talks like that, you know that's one resort he'll be checking into. My opponent won't rule out raising taxes. But I will. And the Congress will push me to raise taxes and I'll say no. And they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again, and I'll say, to them, Read my lips: no new taxes." He's saying that, under no circumstances whatsoever, he will not allow congress to raise taxes, period. By the end of his first year in office, the federal deficit was growing historically, and he was given the choice to either allow congress to raise taxes or to cut the defense budget (this was also after the Cold War had ended); Bush Sr. decided to raise taxes. In order to justify the large defense budget, the Iraq war was started. The whole entire thing was a huge lie.
Again. Try re-reading what I already wrote. A year after he made this statement, he caved. But at the time he made it, he meant it. To my mind, a broken promise also is not a lie, if at the time you made the promise you meant it earnestly. He obviously had no plans to invade Iraq in 1988, 2 years before Iraq had invaded Kuwait.
He rose taxes before Iraq invaded Kuwait, though. Look, if I gave a speech, during which I stated emphatically, that I would never ever eat an animal, and then, at my next meal, I couldn't find anything to eat except for a stick of beef jerky, and I ate the beef jerky, it would fully prove that I had grossly misrepresented my commitment to my promise. That's essentially what Bush did. At the very first budget negotiation after his inauguration, he put tax hikes on the table with only a little hesitation. Considering the quote I provided, that is pretty darn clear that he was misrepresenting his commitment to his promise. Again, this is really not some sort of thing I'm trying to weasel an argument out of- it's a clear popular understanding.
The Obama one is only a little nuanced. He said the quote. He reiterated that point hundreds of times in documented interviews not only before the law was passed, but also after. Once it was concretely proven to be less than true, Obama's big lie was that he tried to retroactively correct the statement: "What we said was, you can keep (your plan) if it hasn’t changed since the law passed." Except, what he said that he said was well documented to be nothing like what he had actually said. It would be like the Bush Sr. case above, except, if Bush Sr. came back in 1991 and said "What I actually said was that I wasn't going to raise taxes unless we had to cut defense budgets." That's not just a lie, but it's deliberately and unsuccessfully trying to gaslight the public, which, from the position of assessing someone's character, is far worse. But, in Obama's case, he had to mislead the public in order to drum up support for the legislation in order to get it rolled through.
But, yes, after the Affordable Care Act was eventually signed into law, Obama said some less than perfectly straightforward things to try and make himself look better. However, in regards to the original statement quoted in the quiz above, I believe he meant it to be truthful same as the example with Bush above.
Bush Sr. broke a promise. Obama tried to cover his ass. I don't think that either action retroactively makes the statement they made in the past a lie. In both cases reasonable people could disagree with my interpretation... it's not as cut and dry as the fact that Biden wasn't lying. Inferring that to be a lie is unreasonable.
Attempted gaslighting means attempting to make someone doubt their own mental capacity in order to manipulate them. Maybe I'm making it sound more sinister than what it really is, but to me, that seems like the intent was for him to save face by misrepresenting what he previously said hundreds of times in recorded interviews and speeches as if no one would recall clearly enough. Obama actually lied a lot about a lot of his campaign promises. Yes, I said "lied," because he promised things that any reasonable person would understand that they would not be able to deliver. Maybe we all misunderstood how reasonable and logical he was and he truly thought that he could close Gitmo and the people interned there would magically evaporate. Anyway, the point is, that if you say something you know to be untrue, and your goal is to get people to believe that untrue statement, it is a lie. All three cases were people saying something they ought to have known was untrue to get elected. Lies.
No, it isn't "basically true". It isn't even close. The vaccines don't keep anyone from catching or spreading Covid. Fauci is also a liar and should be in prison for his role. The entire debacle is criminal on many levels. We helped fund China to create and weaponize viruses that can kill people, and then we aren't really ever going to hold anyone accountable, and probably continue funding such research, and then censor anyone from even addressing it, while destroying the economy, schooling, and peoples' lives. Whether released accidentally or on purpose, we all know that it came from the Wuhan lab, and is being used to further the Great Reset and NWO plans that have been in the works, but now greatly accelerated. Anyone who denies this is living in a dream world. Biden is also clearly a puppet of the people who actually run our country now, and his appearances are comically pathetic. Silver Alert...Silver Alert... I've fallen and I can't get up...
The Obama one always has bugged me. I mean, on one hand, some people did lose their plans. However, the law didn't mandate that they lose their plans. They were grandfathered in. However, the insurance companies chose to stop offering the plans, opting instead for fewer, higher profit offerings. That was a predictable outcome of the law, so in that respect I can see the statement as a lie. But pundits have claimed it as a lie to insist that the government took your plan away, when in fact it was the insurance company's decision.
And on the "that's a stupid phrasing" side, insurance companies terminate plans ALL the time. So even if they didn't jump to higher profit plans, there were ALWAYS going to be people who would lose plans they liked, even if the law didn't pass.
Amazingly, I got that one and I'm not American. There's a catchy song by They Might be Giants with the line "Mr James K Polk the 11th President". So if anyone ever asks me who the 11th president of the USA was, I know the answer. Not that it comes up much.
You could add Eisenhower saying that the U2 spy plane shot down over Russia was just a weather research aircraft
Also when Lincoln said that "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here." in the Gettysburg Address, when the Gettysburg address is literally one of the most famous speeches of all time. (Obviously not a lie, as he didn't know how famous his speech would become, but still)
Did Eisenhower actually say that? You are right that the CIA cover story was that it was a weather observer gone of course. But is there a quote from Ike saying that for this quiz?
According to History.com: Officials in the Eisenhower administration believed that little evidence of the plane’s espionage mission had survived the crash, so they responded that the aircraft was merely a weather plane that had accidentally flown off course.
Wikipedia: Eisenhower could admit responsibility for the U-2 flight, and likely ruin any chances for détente at the Paris Summit, or he could continue to deny knowledge and indicate that he did not control his own administration.
I've always taken issue with Obama's statement being considered a lie. The PPACA didn't directly take away people's coverage. The insurers canceled the policies rather than comply with the law. Obama and Congress only have control over what the law says. It's the insurance companies that screwed people out of coverage. That being said, I suppose the law could have had stricter penalties on canceling coverage but I'm sure if that ever came up it would have been negotiated out of the bill by lobbyists for the insurance companies.
He lied. If I say that you don't have to change your doctor, but it's going to cost you so much money that it's not feasible to keep her, I'm not responsible for your having to drop your doctor? He and his advisors knew damn well that companies (I was on the health care committee of mine when this was passed) insurance companies, and individuals for that matter would have to change their policies/service providers in order to try to keep the cost of health insurance from skyrocketing beyond control. But of course that made convenient to pass the blame onto those parties instead of admitting that Obamacare caused the situation. This is one of the reasons why this country is slowly coming apart - the sheep won't hold politicians, regardless of political party, responsible for their LIES because they just pass the blame for the consequences of their actions on to other people and the sheep believe them.
I’m with you. The Affordable Care Act contained no provisions that required anybody to switch health plans or providers. The greed demonstrated by health insurers as a result of the law is on them, not on Obama.
I disagree. These are the same insurance companies that covered the flooding of the healthcare industry with opioids. He knew better. The affordable care act was a horrible policy anyways. It was designed to shrink the middle class, while the poor get healthcare. My family personally has been on both sides of the equation. One year we were qualified for free healthcare and no problems if your poor. The second you make even just a little bit over the line bro, good luck! We barely made too much, and it was so expensive just to have healthcare. That was going to be enforced by Obama if you didn't pay with jail time/fines. Completely unaffordable to people who usually can afford some. They based prices off of last year's income. Horrible for small businesses! Would have destroyed tons of businesses if enforced because they don't make the same yearly. The entire thing was horrible unless you were poor and 100% unamerican. It was 100% forced onto people.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that "all men are created equal." He also owned slaves. The statement is true, but TJ lied when he wrote it. (Not recommending inclusion of "all men are created equal" as a lie on this quiz, obviously. Just thinking.)
Not a fan of this quiz at all. Divisive, provocative, and way too political - all the things I come to Jetpunk to try to avoid. Hell, I prefer the arguments around whether or not Cyprus is in Europe, or Asia, or the flipping Antarctic over whether various presidents - in recent history - have intentionally lied, or not. Ill-conceived is the most charitable thing I would say about this particular quiz, at this particular time.
I wish there was a way of rating a quiz on Jetpunk as worthy of removal.
I come on to Jetpunk for temporary escape from all the nonsense going on in the world. Good taste should dictate that contemporary politics and politicians be avoided.
I ignore NBA quizzes because I don't care about basketball, if you don't like political quizzes suggest you similarly ignore them. Calling for a quiz you don't like to be removed is frankly ridiculous.
To me, this was anything *but* divisive! "All politicians lie." You can't find a truer idea than that in the world. Sure, people will come into the comments and start yowling about how comparing anything to Trump is a "false equivalency" or how no, the election actually *was* stolen... but the quiz itself was, in my mind, a tool for togetherness. Even the people who react badly and start slinging dung at each other are together in their mutual irrationality. :)
I would not say Teddy Roosevelt was a lie. The man was SHOT IN THE CHEST and he continued giving a speech for some time till he finished. And I think it was his Vice President that said that death came to him in his sleep, because otherwise he would not go down without a fight.
isnt the bull moose one a bit silly? surely nobody ever interpreted that literally? i'm hardly lying if i say "i spilled the beans" and i didnt literally spill beans
I guess this has been done to death at this point, I don't believe that Teddy Rossevelt's state was a lie. I don't think boasting and exaggerating is a lie, especially compared to many other more "worthy" lies that could potentially be on this list.
I do hope that Teddy Roosevelt's statements are removed from this quiz and replaced with another, perhaps with Eisenhower's attempted coverup of the U2 spy plane incident,
What a tragedy that the citizens of the USA did not embrace the opportunity handed to them in 2022 to control such corruption and lies with the charitable gift of the Ministry of Truth
Wow, you included Biden and his vaccination lies, kudos to you quizmaster! To think people were threatened, stigmatised and fired from jobs and shunned by friends and family due to the lies about those jabs.
Your John Adam's reference misses the mark. All humans say things that are untrue or turn out to be untrue. That's not what we mean by a lie. A lie is when we assert things as true that we know to be false. I feel silly to have to point that out, but there you are.
I know, we've already debated what a "lie" is earlier in the comments. Despite this, they are both untruthful statements uttered by United States presidents. For the purposes of this quiz, it sounds like Quizmaster has defined a lie as an untruthful statement.
James K. Polk did not lie, he was referring to the Thornton Affair where the Mexican army crossed into territory that was claimed by the United States (north of the Rio Grande in present day Cameron County, Texas) and killed 14 American soldiers. The territory was also claimed by Mexico but from America's perspective, this statement is true.
I think the idea is that maybe by a certain interpretation of the facts the statement is true, but the spirit of the whole affair was false. U.S. soldiers were literally stationed along the river in a blatant attempt to incite a war, all with the idea of taking California from Mexico. It worked, but the premise of the whole thing was pretty flimsy.
Lies are generally defined as saying something one knows to be false and asserting it as true. Ptolemy wasn't lying when he asserted that the Earth is the center of the universe. He was just wrong.
Without getting into the political weeds or squabbling over who knew what and when, several of these statements (if not more) were made in good faith and based on the information known at the time. It's a mischaracterization to call them lies. Hyperbolic language isn't lying either. That said, there are some bald faced lies and liars here too.
Been trying to find lies on Lincoln's Wikiquote page, this one could be a lie: "I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth."
This quote was also funny to find: "I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him"
The part that I found difficult was that there were lots of lies, lots of things that your Chief Donald might conceivably have said, but only one of which had him as the actual answer.
You don't appear to understand the difference between a lie and half-truth.
Getting vaccinated will certainly prevent infections. Will it prevent all infections in all cases? No, but that isn't what he said. To call it a lie is to make it appear that vaccination is 100% ineffective, which is even more wrong. Your inclusion is more misleading, IMO, than what he said.
I’m not judging him for this artful lie - he is my favorite and, I believe, the best president - just saying he wasn’t entirely honest when he acted as if his mind wasn’t made up yet when we know it was. He also lied again when he said he didn’t know there was a Confederate peace mission sent by Jefferson Davis in the winter of 1865, using artful language like, ‘As far as I know.’
Great quiz, also very much non-partisan.
The Biden quote is basically true. It's like saying "don't buy a lottery ticket. You're not going to win." Is this true for the large majority of people hearing it? Yes. For everyone? Maybe not. Does that make it a "lie." Not my any reasonable definition of the word.
In the case of the Obama and Bush Sr. quotes, I think they were probably intended to be true, but, later, political realities set in beyond their direct control.
In Nixon's case, I don't think he was lying in this particular instance so much as expressing his own psychopathy. A better one for him might have been "I am not a crook."
and finally in the case of Teddy Roosevelt... that was more boast than lie, obviously... and... I'm not sure that one wasn't also true.
But, yes, after the Affordable Care Act was eventually signed into law, Obama said some less than perfectly straightforward things to try and make himself look better. However, in regards to the original statement quoted in the quiz above, I believe he meant it to be truthful same as the example with Bush above.
Bush Sr. broke a promise. Obama tried to cover his ass. I don't think that either action retroactively makes the statement they made in the past a lie. In both cases reasonable people could disagree with my interpretation... it's not as cut and dry as the fact that Biden wasn't lying. Inferring that to be a lie is unreasonable.
Speak for yourself, that’s obviously a false conspiracy theory.
And on the "that's a stupid phrasing" side, insurance companies terminate plans ALL the time. So even if they didn't jump to higher profit plans, there were ALWAYS going to be people who would lose plans they liked, even if the law didn't pass.
Also when Lincoln said that "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here." in the Gettysburg Address, when the Gettysburg address is literally one of the most famous speeches of all time. (Obviously not a lie, as he didn't know how famous his speech would become, but still)
Wikipedia: Eisenhower could admit responsibility for the U-2 flight, and likely ruin any chances for détente at the Paris Summit, or he could continue to deny knowledge and indicate that he did not control his own administration.
I wish there was a way of rating a quiz on Jetpunk as worthy of removal.
I come on to Jetpunk for temporary escape from all the nonsense going on in the world. Good taste should dictate that contemporary politics and politicians be avoided.
President: "We're not going to get involved in any foreign wars or conflicts."
*almost immediately does so*
It's funny how that works, though a few of them (e.g. the FDR quote) were certainly justified
I do hope that Teddy Roosevelt's statements are removed from this quiz and replaced with another, perhaps with Eisenhower's attempted coverup of the U2 spy plane incident,
I mean, "Disinformation Governance Board"
I am the last president of the United States! - James Buchanan. Clearly untrue.
Also John Adam's last words were "Thomas Jefferson still survives", which is untrue, as Thomas Jefferson had died a few hours earlier.
Without getting into the political weeds or squabbling over who knew what and when, several of these statements (if not more) were made in good faith and based on the information known at the time. It's a mischaracterization to call them lies. Hyperbolic language isn't lying either. That said, there are some bald faced lies and liars here too.
This quote was also funny to find: "I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him"
Getting vaccinated will certainly prevent infections. Will it prevent all infections in all cases? No, but that isn't what he said. To call it a lie is to make it appear that vaccination is 100% ineffective, which is even more wrong. Your inclusion is more misleading, IMO, than what he said.