There Are Three Kinds Of Lies: Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics
We apologize…
To the Mark Twain fans who believe he was the first to make the cogent argument about figures, statistics, lies and liars.
Because he wasn’t. Take his word for it:
“Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: `There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’”
So, here’s some information and a few statistics that might cause acid reflux on a patio in Palm Beach:
On February 17, 2024 (Presidents Day), the co-directors of the Presidential Greatness Project, political science professors Brandon Rottinghaus (University of Houston) and Justin Vaughn (Coastal Carolina University) released their third survey of nearly 200 scholars across multiple disciplines whose works engage presidential politics.
The big surprise of the latest PGP was that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had passed George Washington as the second-greatest president.
Consistent with previous PGP surveys, Abraham Lincoln took top honors.
Over three surveys (2012, 2018 and 2024) Ulysses S. Grant climbed from #28 to #21 and finally #17, while Andrew Jackson dropped from #9 to #18 and finally #21.
In C-SPAN and other surveys, the Top 3 honorees are consistently Lincoln, Washington and FDR, with the latter two occasionally changing places.
Disappointingly for some, in June 2025, the National Park Service issued a statement to The New York Times concluding, “The carved portion of Mount Rushmore has been thoroughly evaluated, and there are no viable locations left for additional carvings.”
Nonetheless, PGP respondents’ choices for not-possible additions were FDR, followed by Barack Obama, Dwight Eisenhower, JFK and James Madison.
Not surprisingly and in the idiom of their day, these three were straightforward in their language – spoken or written.
Washington:
“A man’s intentions should be allowed in some respects to plead for his actions.” (Letter to the Speaker of the House of Burgesses, April 18, 1756.)
“I shall make it the most agreeable part of my duty to study merit, and reward the brave and deserving.” (Address to the Officers of the Virginia Regiment, January 8, 1756.)
“I had always hoped that this land might become a safe & agreeable Asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.” (Letter to Francis Adrian Van Der Kemp, May 28, 1788.)
“Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.” (Letter to Major-General Robert Howe, August 1779.)
“…when one side only of a story is heard, and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it, insensibly.” (Letter to Edmund Pendleton, January 22, 1795.)
“Having now finished the work assigned to me, I retire from the great theatre of action.” (Address to Congress Resigning his Commission, December 23, 1783.)
Lincoln:
“The struggle of today is not altogether for today – it is for a vast future also.” (Address to Congress, 1861)
“I have an irrepressible desire to live till I can be assured that the world is a little better for my having lived in it.” (From a poem Lincoln wrote about his battle with mental health, according to Lincoln’s close friend Joshua Speed.)
“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” (The Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863.)
“Let us strive on to finish the work we are in.” (Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865/)
“Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.” (Letter to H.L. Pierce, April 6, 1859.)
Roosevelt:
“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished…The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." (Inaugural Address, January 30,1937.)
"True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made." (State of the Union Message, January 11, 1944.)
“This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly.” (Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933.)
“Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.” (Radio address to the nation on the “Mobilization for Human Needs,” October 13, 1940.)
“Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits.” (Inaugural Address, March 5, 1933.)
Great presidents, indeed, great men and women, speak plainly. Using honest language. Without fear-inducing hyperbole or the hyperbole-of-fear.
So, respectfully, we’re offering the first of a series of checklists of words and phrases by which to judge present and future political candidates. We invite you to examine their lexicons and we’re offer a suggestion: Set a number – 10, 20, (for your mental health probably not more than) 25; checkoff every time a candidate uses the word or phrase and (depending on how it is used) deduct a point. When they hit your imposed limit, they lose your valued vote.
“Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them.
Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.”
Jesus
Mark 7:15
WOKE. Almost seven decades ago, we learned from the good Sisters at Epiphany School that “woke” is the past tense and past participle of the verb “wake.” Among its synonyms: “raised”; (dare we write it?) “aroused”; (now we’re pushing the boundaries of propriety) “knocked up”; (Don’t blame us; blame Merriam Webster.) “stimulated.” Folks who accuse others of being “woke” are either referring to someone who had been sleeping or are using fourth grade “potty mouth” speak.
ANTIFA (or is it Antifa?) Either way, it’s politician-speak for “anti-fascist.” There’s no organization. No membership lists. You can’t sign-up for it at a fraternity rush party or be invited to join like the Knights of Columbus; unlike the VFW, they don’t even have club houses with bars.
On September 23, 2025, PBS News Hour host Geoff Bennett interviewed Luke Baumgartner, a Research Fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, focusing on domestic violent extremism, white supremacist movements, and the role of military veterans in political violence. Here’s a sample of Baumgartner’s opening statements sans Bennett’s questions:
“So, simply put Antifa is just short for anti-fascist. If you want to get more simple than that it just means the opposition to fascism. Now, their belief system has a fairly wide range of encompassing ideologies, mostly on the political left. And they encompass anarchists, socialists, communists and a lot of people in between there.
“There is no hierarchical organizational structure.
“It is primarily a movement and an ideology. And there are no leaders. There are no assets. There are no bank accounts or revenue streams to go after either.
“I would classify it more as a political scapegoat, honestly.
“There have been incidents of political violence linked to far left extremists in the U.S. in recent years, but the overwhelming majority of the data points towards far right extremism being a much more serious threat to national security.
“In the last five, six, seven years or the last 10 years more broadly, we have seen a rise in left-wing or left-aligned political violence. You can look at the shooting at the congressional baseball game as one or the recent attacks on a ICE facility or the CBP station down at Texas.
“But data bears out time and time again from the University of Maryland, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies as well as my own work at the Program on Extremism that political violence in the U.S. has overwhelmingly been attributed to those on the far end of the political spectrum.
“There is no codified prohibition for domestic terrorist groups in the U.S. That does not exist in U.S. penal code, the way it would for foreign terrorist organizations like al-Qaida or ISIS. So, the full brunt and the full weight of the U.S. government and law enforcement agencies can't exactly come down on it like they would for others.
“And, as I mentioned before, there's no bank accounts, there's no revenue streams, and there's no well-known or at least well-documented proof of funding….”
Unnamed countries are deliberately “emptying” their “insane asylyms” and “mental institutions.” This is an oft repeated and frequently embellished claim of President Trump; it’s reasonable to expect it will multiply like boa constrictors in the Everglades over the next few years. On three occasions in March and April 2023, candidate Trump used this fear-inducing refrain, coupling it with a tale of an unnamed
“psychologist. Or psychiatrist. But a psychologist. Who worked in mental wards in South America. And he said, ‘I worked 24…’ – a good man – he worked 24 hours a day taking care of very mentally ill people. And he was sitting there reading a newspaper and they asked him, what – what’s he doing? He said, ‘I have no more work. The people have all been let go into the United States.’ Can you believe? This is what we’re doing.”
On April 28, 2023, CNN Politics (“Fact check: Trump’s own campaign can’t find proof for his ‘mental institutions’ immigration story.” Daniel Dale.) reported:
“Trump’s campaign was unable to provide any evidence of the existence of a news story about a no-longer-busy doctor at a South American mental institution – and the campaign also failed to provide any evidence that South American countries are emptying mental health facilities to somehow send patients into the US. Representatives for two anti-immigration organizations told us they had not heard of anything that would corroborate any of Trump’s story, as did three experts at organizations favorable toward immigration. CNN’s own search did not produce any evidence. The website FactCheck.org also found nothing…
“First we reached out to Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung to ask for proof. In response, Cheung sent us links to news articles that were not proof. These articles did not mention anything about South American mental health facilities being emptied under President Joe Biden, nor feature any quote from a doctor at any such facility.
“Cheung did cite a report that late Cuban despot Fidel Castro included mental health patients in the Mariel boatlift of 1980 (they made up a small percentage of the people involved in the boatlift), but that was 43 years ago; Trump’s stories have all been present-tense claims about events purportedly happening during Biden’s presidency. And Cheung highlighted a 2022 article from right-wing website Breitbart News about Venezuela supposedly freeing criminals from prison to become migrants. Breitbart’s vague and unverified claim did not mention mental health facilities or doctors at all….”
On May 1, 1980, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro declared, “Those who have no revolutionary genes, those who have no revolutionary blood...we do not want them, we do not need them.” In the following five months, 125,266 Cubans boarded an initial flotilla of 1700 fishing and shrimping vessels and private crafts of all sizes, fleeing to South Florida.
These refugees – “Marielito Cubans” - differed from those who arrived two decades earlier. They were of darker skin – more Afro-Cuban, working class; many spoke a different Spanish than their predecessors – a Cuban Spanish that had been influenced by twenty-years of the Castro regime and was marked by a whole new slang. Numbers were homosexual at a time when there was a huge stigma – within the Cuban community that arrived in the early 1960s and among Americans in general. Admittedly some had been imprisoned; some for crimes prosecutable in the United States but the vast majority for the “crime” of being anti-Castro and anti-communists.
Few Americans outside of South Florida are even aware of the more than 35,000 “Balsero Cubans” who fled the island on makeshift rafts and in leaky boats in the early mid-1990s.
But the repeated assertion that Castro was opening his “prisons” and “insane asylums” struck terror (a deliberate choice of word) into the white-Anglo community of a then much smaller South Florida population.
The unfounded, undocumented, hyperbolic use of the accusation from Trump and his allies is simply a politically motivated rehash of words and phrases that can easily be traced to 1980.
“What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them,
but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.”
Jesus
Matthew 15:11