Lies, Damned Lies, and Politicians

I like politics; I don’t like all of the lying involved.  If you ask me, I think that there should be “Ethics Committee” investigations into all of the lying.  Sure, tweeting a picture of your junk is probably not the best idea, but neither is lying.  And nearly all politicians are guilty [1].  Fortunately, the St. Petersburg Times started a website call Politifact [2] with the hopes of keeping some of these people honest.  I’m not sure it’s helping.

In any case, I wrote an R script to scrape the data from Politifact so that I could do some analysis.  I only got about as far as the following figure related to some of the Republican candidates and their propensity to lie.  The figure displays the number of statements made by each candidate that can be categorized as “True”, “Mostly True”, …, “False”, or “Pants on Fire” according to Politifact.

What can we take from this?  Well, Michelle Bachmann is a big-time liar — ain’t no denying that.  She’s also a freaking nutjob.  Ron Paul probably lies the least, but nobody seems to care about him in the media. Tim Pawlenty doesn’t lie too much.  Then again, he’s a wuss and dropped out anyway.  Mitt Romney seems pretty good when it comes to speaking the truth; it’s gotta be the Mormon background.  I suspect that he’ll lie a bit more in the upcoming months.  And Rick Perry…well, he’s just bat-shit crazy, so I’ll ignore him.

If I had the time, I would try to randomly select some Republicans and Democrats from both the House and Senate and analyse of statement category (truth through pants on fire) is independent of political party and/or branch of Congress.  If you’re interested in doing this, I would be happy to help you get started.  Have a look at my github repo for this project and give it a go!

Footnotes:

[1] – Note that I said ‘nearly all’ because Dennis Kucinich doesn’t have a single statement classified as “Pants on Fire” on Politifact.

[2] – Winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 2009.