On Monday’s edition of CBS’s “Daily Report,” host CBS News Chief Political Analyst, and Senior National Correspondent John Dickerson stated that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) “lied” about meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, President Joe Biden has done similar, but these aren’t as bad as 2024 Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump.
Dickerson began by saying, “Gov. Kristi Noem is in trouble for telling the truth about what she did to her dog and lying about what she didn’t do on the world stage. I’d like to focus on the second one. She claims she met and stared down North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, which did not happen.”
He added, “Noem, who has been talked about as a possible vice presidential nominee, won’t admit that she lied, but she retracted the story because she knows a public official who relies on public trust can’t be associated with pushing an easily verifiable lie. But how much does it matter when a politician tells this sort of lie? Others have told stories that were not true, President Joe Biden did it. It ended his race in 1988. He came back, though.”
Dickerson continued, “One way to define what crosses the line is to look at the severity of the lie, the higher the stakes, the more dangerous the lie, and therefore, the more disqualifying for the liar. A high-stakes lie causes damage or endangers people or incites others to violence. A person who tells a lie with those kinds of high stakes is either deceitful or delusional, especially if they do it more than once and in the face of obvious evidence that what they are saying is a lie. So, we found a line: A high-stakes lie, told repeatedly, a person who does that not only does damage with the lie itself, but makes a promise, if given power, they’d be just fine reacting to the hard realities of leadership with deception, the stakes would not move them. This brings us to Donald Trump, in an effort to define the far reaches on the scale of dangerous political lies, we’ve arrived at the former President, who has founded his campaign around the repeated dangerous lie that the last election was stolen. Noem retracted the lie in her book. When the stakes were lower, she did the more honorable thing than the man whose ticket she hoped to join did, and still does, when the stakes are far higher.”
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