Clint Eastwood’s Jobless Exaggeration

consortiumnews.com — One reason lying apparently works in politics is that so many people are content to tell themselves that “everybody does it.” This illusion may be comforting, but it’s also a self-deceptive evasion of harder truth: the scale and frequency of lies matter, and everybody doesn’t lie on the same scale or at the same rate. To take a relatively small example, Clint Eastwood asserted in passing, without elaboration in his talk-to-the-empty-chair at the Republican National Convention, that “there are 23 million unemployed people in this country.” That is simply false. There have never been 23 million unemployed people in this country. When a Hollywood actor is wrong in a political speech, the stakes are relatively low. But the Romney campaign defended Eastwood’s 23 million figure by re-inventing what he said to include part-time workers, the so-called “underemployed.”

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