Since Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her vice presidential running mate on Aug. 6, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance has been attacking Walz’s credibility.
Vance questioned Walz’s honesty about his military serviceand artificial insemination method Walz and his wife used.
“Why lie?” Vance told reporters last week when asked about Walz’s comments that he confused in vitro fertilization with intrauterine insemination.
The first method was not the one Walz and his wife used and is opposed by some in the anti-abortion movement. The second was used by Tim and Gwen Walz and is favored by abortion opponents because it does not destroy embryos fertilized outside the womb.
Doctors told the Associated Press that patients and their partners often confuse processes.
But there are two more questions beyond whether Walz made a deliberate or unintentional slip of the tongue: When he accuses someone of being a liar, is Vance a hypocrite? And if he is, does it matter?
During the campaign, Vance certainly talked about what Mark Twain called “the stretcher.”
He left from supporting human-caused climate change to doubting it though the enormous majority Scientists who study the issue say it is a catastrophic and growing problem.
Vance once compared former President Donald Trump to HitlerNow he’s running for vice president on Trump’s behalf.
In 2016, he warned Trump about false claims of election fraud. Then in 2022, when he was running for the U.S. Senate, Vance himself he started lying about election fraud.
He even lies about basic details of his background. In fundraising emails, Vance says:I grew up in a diminutive town called Middletown, Ohio.”
This is actually city of 47,000 inhabitantsThe Census Bureau defines diminutive towns as those where less than 5000 people or — about one-tenth the size of Vance’s hometown.
And then there’s the fact that Vance is on the list with Trump, who is probably the most an extremely dishonest president in US history.
So when Vance accuses Walz of lying, he could face charges of living in a glass house and throwing rocks.
So far, Vance’s attacks on Walz’s credibility don’t seem to have much impact. But that’s probably not because GOP voters have decided Vance is a hypocrite and not worth listening to, one expert said. In these hyperpartisan times, truth is in the ear of the listener, he explained.
“No matter how you slice or dice it, unless they’ve been caught red-handed and the evidence is clear, compelling and convincing, partisans will still believe their preferred politician did nothing wrong,” University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus said in an interview last week. “Politicians can get a lot done because their partisans believe them.”
This also applies to politicians who accuse others of lying, even if they themselves often do so, Rottinghaus said.
“These things are independent of each other. Accusing someone of being a liar has no bearing on other people accusing you of being a liar,” he said. “People live in their own political worlds and will believe what their party comrades tell them.”
Unfortunately, this means that the more polarized we become, the further we drift from a shared sense of truth.
“You can live in a world where you think Donald Trump is an honest person,” Rottinghaus said. “You can also live in a world where Donald Trump says other people are liars. And both of those things can be true in your mind because partisanship has perpetuated those paths. People live in their own partisan political fantasy world.”
