Kevin Drum is no raving lefty. Yeah, he’s not particularly fond of George Bush, but he works hard (a little too hard, I sometimes think) to maintain a certain degree of mainstream credibility.

Anyway, with that said, you really should check out what he’s done here: Bush lies more than Kerry… Film at 11:00… Basically, he reviewed lots of mainstream media fact-checking articles on the town hall debate last Friday, and scored the candidates on all their lies. To make the comparison more meaningful, he scored the lies in terms of their degree of inaccuracy, the apparent intent to mislead, and the importance of the underlying issue.

When he was done, he ended up with a “dishonesty score” of 118 for Bush, 60 for Kerry. Additionally, he found that Bush had 7 “serious” lies, while Kerry had only one. (Update: Valued-reader Sven writes to point out that Drum’s revised analysis now shows Kerry with no serious lies in the debate.)

In other words, Bush rather clearly lied more than Kerry and lied more seriously than Kerry. I did my best to apply the same rigor to both candidates, but even with a different formula and different scoring, it’s hard to see how Bush wouldn’t come out as seriously more deceptive than Kerry. As Halperin said, deception seems to be central to George Bush’s campaign while it’s basically peripheral to John Kerry’s.

Those who question the numbers are free to analyize the specifc scores awarded by Drum in each case; he includes detail on all of them in the linked-to item.

This entry was posted by jbc on Monday, October 11th, 2004 at 9:23 pm and is filed under george_w_bush, the_usa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.