Remember the good old days when politicians could lie without the nuisance of instant Internet fact-checking?
Well, it clearly doesn't matter anyway, apparently. Just look to poll numbers.
If it did, Donald "Pants-on-fire" Trump would have about 2 percent of likely GOP voters' support instead of 23 to 37 percent - depending on the day and the poll you read.
Just before Thanksgiving, Politico.com wrote, "Everybody knows that politicians lie and exaggerate. All you have to do is turn on your television. But Campaign 2016 might be teaching a corollary lesson to the trailing candidates for president. Perhaps they aren't lying enough for their own political good."
The truth - yes the truth - is that Politico just wasn't listening carefully enough. All the GOP candidates were clearly already all in.
In fairness to Politico, the online magazine did note that Ben Carson - then second in the polls - "could start a used toy shop with his Pinocchio collection."
But even before the heat started with Trump's fabricated "thousands and thousands" of New Jersey Muslims celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11 - something now well documented as an outright falsehood yet Trump continues to say it - Carly Fiorina falsely hyped the deceptively edited videos of Planned Parenthood conversations with members of an anti-abortion group that misrepresented itself. Even after all the subterfuge in the videos came to light, Fiorina said she saw a shot of a breathing aborted fetus, "heart-beating," on a table as someone says "we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain." She didn't. There is an image that shows something like that in stock footage, but not in those videos, according to fact checkers. Further, there is no information as to whether it were an aborted baby or a baby born prematurely.
In the past week, the lies have kicked up to frenzy level.
In the wake of the Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado last week, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz chose to paint the shooter something conservatives would loathe - a "transgendered leftist activist" rather than acknowledge that his party's rhetorical tantrums about the hoax Planned Parenthood videos may have contributed to Robert Louis Dear's decision to shoot up a clinic. (By the way, Colorado officials say Dear's identification as a woman on his registration form was a data entry error made in the county clerk's office.)
Cruz said attempts to link Dear to conservatives' anti-abortion mission was just "vicious rhetoric on the left blaming those who are pro-life."
Marco Rubio gets tied up even by family and religious history.
"In 1971, Marco was born in Miami to Cuban-born parents who came to America following Fidel Castro's takeover," his Senate biography stated. But his parents actually arrived in the US in 1956, before the revolution, and even made multiple trips back to Cuba. Rubio insisted he hadn't known his family's actual history, according to Mother Jones. And he's been Catholic, Mormon, Baptist, an environmentalist and a climate change denier. You get the drift.
Chris Christie stood on a debate stage and said he was appointed U.S. attorney by President Bush on Sept 10, 2001. He said it several times, insinuating that he was acting in that job on and just after the country was attacked by terrorists. That was, at best, misleading. A White House news release dated Dec. 7, 2001, says the president "intends to nominate" Christie as the next U.S. attorney for New Jersey. Christie was officially confirmed by the U.S. senate on Dec. 20, 2001, and sworn into office on Jan. 17, 2002. Christie's spokeswoman told Politifact that "the White House notified Christie" that he was the president's choice on Sept. 10, "and that extensive background checks on his qualifications would begin immediately."
Then there's Jeb Bush, who said President Barack Obama did not invite a Republican senator to dine at the White House until 2013 - his fifth year in office.
Here's the Politifact-checked truth: "Based on our review of visitor logs, there are a handful of instances in which Republican U.S. senators visited the White House residence between 2009 and 2012, including a 2011 dinner attended by Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell. There's also that high-profile 2010 case in which Obama invited two Republican senators to dinner - the famous Slurpee Summit - only to be publicly snubbed. We rate this claim false."
When you sift through all the fabricated stories, unsubstantiated claims and lies - or even just poorly informed assertions - you have to wonder: Who are these people that the GOP is running for president?
And you have to wonder why we should trust any of them.
If they were selling themselves as consumer products, they might be labeled frauds. Yet as they present themselves as wannabe presidents, we're just expected to chalk it all up as political "spin."
The truth? Or even half truth?
Don't look for it among these guys.