When Senator Jon Kyl and his staff opened up their “not intended to be a factual statement” can of worms last week we caught a glimpse behind the curtain of politics. We all know the old joke: “How do you know a politician is lying? When they’ve opened their mouth.” But the real problem with these non-factual statements aren’t really that they’re lies, it’s that they’re so easily disproven. It would have taken 30 seconds to get a real number off of Google. Given how amazingly wrong Kyl’s number was, there is *NO* way that Kyl and his staff could have possibly looked for a real number. What we have here is a politician who wants to rant about something he doesn’t like, so he just makes something up. That doesn’t make him a liar, just lazy.
As far as I’m concerned that makes him a worse lawmaker than if he had lied.