Former marine sergeant Evan McAllister feels that way. The WP reoprts that “the war he fought was a harebrained mission planned by Republicans, rubber-stamped by Democrats and, in the end, lost to al-Qaeda’s brutal successor. The foreign policy establishment of both parties got his friends killed for no reason, he said, so come Election Day, he is voting for the man he believes answers to neither Democrats nor Republicans: Donald Trump. ‘Most veterans . . . they see their country lost to the corrupt. And Trump comes along all of a sudden and calls out the corrupt on both sides of the aisle.’”
According to another former marine, “‘I think there’s a pretty sour taste in a lot of guys’ mouths about Iraq and about what happened there,” said Jim Webb Jr., a Marine veteran, Trump supporter, son of former U.S. senator Jim Webb (D-Va.) and one of McAllister’s platoon mates. ‘You pour time and effort and blood into something, and you see it pissed away, and you think, ‘How did I spend my twenties?’” Those are good reasons to support Donald Trump, right? After all, Hillary Clinton rubber stamped the Iraq war while in the US Senate and one can reasonably argue it was a failure. Or, are they such good reasons?
Mendacity, deceit & misinformation: According to the fact checkers, there's false information coming from the mouths of both presidential candidates. There's nothing unusual about that. It's all constitutionally protected free speech. Nonetheless, it doesn't hurt to keep the situation in mind. Here's PolitiFacts's profile of Clinton and Trump:
Hillary Clinton's profile
Donald Trump's profile
Of course that's just how one source sees it. At least some if not most Trump supporters vehemently deny the data and accuse PolitiFact of routine anti-conservative and anti-Trump bias. In the minds of those Trump supporters PolitiFact data is simply false and therefore meaningless or even proof of Trump's honesty. Another fact checking source, FactCheck.org also finds a lot of false information coming from the two candidates, with Clinton maybe doing better than Trump in terms of honest rhetoric. Fact checking of Trump's repeated claims that he opposed the Iraq war before it started shows the claims are false, although Trump apparently began expressing reservations about it some months after it started. FactCheck reports a financial incentive, an impending junk bond sale, for Trump to oppose the Iraq war. Uncertainty that new wars tend to create make new financing more complicated or difficult.
Do facts matter? Regardless of what the facts may be, does it really matter? Social and cognitive science research argues that (i) elections do not produce responsive governments, (ii) social or group identity, not facts, is the most important driver of perceptions of reality, belief and behavior for voters, and (iii) and the unconscious human mind is a powerful distorter of fact and conscious thinking or reason. Humans are expert at distorting or denying and rationalizing away inconvenient truths. We fully believe our own rationalizations. The human desire to believe what we want is powerful and unconscious. We believe we are rational and base our beliefs on solid facts when the evidence is usually to the contrary. So, when a candidate says something that provokes intense criticism and then dismisses it as "sarcasm" or a joke, that candidate's followers accept it, while the opponent's supporters do not.
When fact checkers assert a candidate has lied, the candidate's supporters tend to reject that, or accept it but downplay or distort its importance. Of course, that assumes there is an objective basis on which to assess the importance of a lie when evaluating a candidate's suitability for office. Under the circumstances, one can reasonably argue that most political rhetoric is mostly meaningless. If that's not a believable proposition, consider how very little credibility (i) most Trump supporters accord almost anything that Clinton says, and (ii) most Clinton supporters accord almost anything that Trump says. If fact checkers do provide some objective data, it appears to have little or no influence on at least strong supporters of either candidate.
Question: Is most political campaign rhetoric meaningless?
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