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I mean, I'm neither going to pretend to be one of the 'nice' people, nor claiming that the 'nice' people are actually nice -- Romney's my central example in the above post because he's particularly two-faced about it in a single book and a single article, but if you want one of my rants about David French I've got a pretty wide variety to choose from! And there's definitely a tendency for a Russell Conjugation of politeness, demanding carefully-drawn borders of acceptable discourse that one would never be tempted to overstep, while calling people they don't like as acting moronic.
There's some fun debates about whether the belligerent assholes or the 'nice' hegimonizing swarm are more directionally correct, but I'm willing to assume for the sake of this discussion that the assholes are at least a little more honest, or at least make finding the truth more likely in the end. My problem is that even at the most charitable, being just a little more honest than the 'nice' hegimonizing swarm is damning with extremely faint praise.
Like, for your specific example, progressive are and always were also going to quibble about Springfield vs Dayton and Haiti versus Africa, or whether one example is enough, but they can also now deflect because there weren't any dogs involved. There's actually a decent number of social and structural reasons that dogs are particularly unlikely, but even without them there's just the bit where it wasn't even on the twitter radar pre-debate. It's possible Trump had some external information otherwise. There's reason his advocates have mostly dropped it, though.
It's not that this is necessarily 'more' lying. I'd quibble with MacDougald a lot, here: as much as Trump is a bullshitter, you can absolutely find a ton of examples of just straightforward lies from the 'Nice' people, including many in last week's debate. My complaint is that if we belligerent assholes are advertising ourselves as talking about the truth, it'd be nice if belligerent assholes were actually doing that.
((Just as my complaint over at theschism is that it'd be nice if the 'Nice' people weren't talking about how they should metaphorically punch and literally remove from public discussion the people they disagree with.))
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