Kurt Schlichter coins one of the best terms to crop up on the internet: the “aspirational lie.” From Schlichter at theburningplatform.com:
Call it an “aspirational lie,” the kind of lie that an establishment-type tells you that is manifestly, obviously, what-the-hell-are-you-kidding-me false, but he/she/xe tells it to you anyway because he/she/xe really really really wants it to be true and because he/she/xe does not want to admit that his/her/xir institution is broken. Take Justice John Souter Roberts’s astonishingly untrue statement from last week:
“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”
Every word of this is blatantly false, and the punctuation is pretty deceptive too. If you dished out such a dog’s breakfast of bogus clichés to one of those vaunted jurists he refers to during an oral argument, you’d have a bad day. And you should.
