Why isn't it plainly, simply illegal for a politician to lie?
How can any democracy... ultimately any form of government where the governed are, um, governed...
Function without truthful information?
Is it my #autism talking...
Or what-the-actual-fuck moment?
The actually serious answer is that, the recent uptick notwithstanding, politicians in general lie a lot less than the public perception says they do.
There's a big issue with people just assuming that simply getting elected is enough for a politician to do everything they wanted/promised/intended to do. And if they don't, it's because they were lying.
But...
(continued)
Unlike what a certain current sitting US President and his cronies would like to be true, simply getting elected doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want.
Because there are other politicians who were elected on their own promises and intentions and those don't always align.
And all those politicians have to work out amongst themselves, through debating and voting, what actually gets done.
(continued)
If there was a law that made it illegal for politicians to lie, most politicians would have to spend almost all their time in court explaining that the promises they made during the election were aspirational.
And campaign speeches would suddenly go along the lines of 'If I get elected, I promise to try my very best to implement x policy... But it may not happen, because people in other districts may vote for politicians who don't want that."
(continued one final time)
And all of these instances of people accusing politicians of lying, when they actually weren't...
Well that would make it a lot harder to prove in court that the politicians who were blatantly lying were doing so intentionally.
A politician who tells a blatant lie would almost always be able to claim afterwards that they believed that what they were saying was true at the time and it would be hard to prove that's not true.
Johnny Profane Âû
Robbert van Eijndhoven