More than one type of honesty...

I see liberal after liberal telling us that Donald Trump was certainly the bigger "liar" in an election that almost everyone agreed was not exactly very truthful. Playing loose and fast with the facts is what politicians do, but some really want to figure out a way to objectively quantify it, and ultimately prove that one was more "dishonest" than the other. This was evident as these same liberals started citing "fact checking" websites that told them that (by percentage) Donald Trump told more lies than Hillary Clinton.

First of all, how can you even measure? We start with the reality that not every single statement provided required "fact checking". The fact checkers were the ones who got to decide which statements warranted fact checking and which ones didn't. So the reality isn't that 70% of what Donald Trump said was a lie and 30% of what Clinton said was a lie.  Rather, it was "of the statements" that they decided to check, the amount of untruthful statements were 70% and 30%. This can be deceiving when you treat one person literally and the other figuratively. For instance Donald Trump was "fact checked" for calling Obama the "founder of ISIS" while Hillary Clinton was not "fact checked" for calling Trump a "Sergeant of Recruiting for ISIS".  In the first example fact checkers were taking a hyperbole statement literally, while in the second they understood it to be figurative.

Secondly, the fact checkers are not necessarily objective. They can see a statement that was exaggerated (possibly to draw attention) and judge it to be a "lie" for Donald Trump because they didn't care to see (or even look for) the point, but declare the same sort of an exaggeration as "mostly true" for Clinton because they understood the point she was trying to make. Other times, they simply are wrong on facts, or use one set of data to declare something false when there is competing data that show it to be true.

But either way, honestly is not just about whether or not someone else views your statement to be mostly true or mostly false. There is another type of honestly that actually is actually vastly more important than what percentage of a politicians campaign statements are declared false by fact checkers. That honestly is your ability to tell people what it is that you believe, how you feel about issues, and what is truly important to you, deep down at your very core.

My oldest son voted in his first election. He is an extremely bright young man who has been tested with a very high IQ, but also tested on the autism scale as having Asperger's syndrome. He behaves for the most part like a normal person, but he is very literal in his thinking, and very non-emotional. He's had almost zero interest in politics, it's never really been discussed, and there is literally no indoctrination of any degree in his politics. He simply wanted to do his own research in this situation and asked for nobody else's opinion (not sure he would even see the point in asking someone else's opinion).

But imagine for a second, someone walking into this particular election, with so much at stake, and not having even the slightest bias as to which Party was better, which candidate had what reputation, or anything else that clutters the minds of most people deciding who to vote for.

At the end of the day, according to what he told his Mother... he decided to vote for Donald Trump. Not necessarily because he agreed with everything he stood for, but because he felt like he understood it. Apparently the most obvious conclusion he was able to draw from his research on the two of them was that Trump appeared willing to say what he actually thought and believe, where he felt that Hillary Clinton was only saying what she thought people wanted to hear. So in his very literal mind, she offered him nothing he could judge her on. He simply didn't believe that she necessarily "meant" anything she was saying. What's truly remarkable about this is his very nature is to take things literally. To the degree that her "lack of sincerity" was apparent must be very large for my son to see it.

At the end of the day, that sort of honestly (or sincerity) is sort of what many people found refreshing about Donald Trump. The ability and willingness to say whatever it was that he wanted to say, political correctness, and political consequences damned. The fact that he exaggerated some of the facts and probably got others wrong was simply not at issue for a large number of voters. They were more interested in the intangible form of honesty that comes with being sincere, than the more tangible type that certain people were trying to keep a scorecard on.