By BERRY CRAIG
AFT Local 1360
Donald Trump is fibbing so fast, Washington Post fact checkers say they can't keep up.
As we hit the campaign homestretch, the president started "making more than 50 false or misleading claims a day," wrote Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly in the paper. "....As of Aug. 27, the tally in our database that tracks every errant claim by the president stood at 22,247 claims in 1,316 days."
The scribes added: "Just in the first 27 days of August, the president made 1,506 false or misleading claims, or 56 a day. Some days were extraordinary: 189 claims (a record) on Aug. 11, 147 claims on Aug. 17, 113 claims on Aug. 20. The previous one-day record was 138 claims — on Nov. 5, 2018, the day before the midterm elections.
"The previous monthly record was 1,205 in October 2018."
We'll probably never know why Trump says so many things that are so easily proven to be falsehoods or obvious distortions of fact.
Sen. Bernie Sanders and others say Trump's a pathological liar, a condition also known as mythomania and pseudologia, according to Healthline.com. By any name, it's "the chronic behavior of compulsive or habitual lying," the website says. "Unlike telling the occasional white lie to avoid hurting someone's feelings or getting in trouble, a pathological liar seems to lie for no apparent reason. This can make it frustrating or hard to know what to do if you believe you’ve met one."
In Trump's case it's easy. Vote for Joe Biden.
Anyway, others (click here, here, here, here and here.) say Trump is trotting out the Big Lie, which Merriam-Webster online defines as "a deliberate gross distortion of the truth used especially as a propaganda tactic."
The Big Lie was spelled out in a book published in 1924. The author explained: "...In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
"It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying."
The author was Adolf Hitler, the book Mein Kampf.