Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Presidential prevarications (United States)
per nom. The article's topic has severe problems with |bias in that a president's detractors are likely to seize on any misstatement as being a lie, while his supporters are likely to try to seek excuses or attempt to prove that his statement was accurate or at least not an intentional lie. This problem is likely to be most apparent with regard to recent presidents such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, which also raises the issue of |recentism. There is also an issue with regard to defining what a lie is. I would not consider a broken promise to be a lie, unless the promiser never intended to fulfill the promise. Several of the alleged lies in the article are really just broken promises, and that's not the same thing. And what do we do about things like Obama's claim to have visited http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/57states.asp "57 states" during his campaign (not currently listed in this article, but then no Obama statements currently are)? Obviously, that wasn't a true statement, but does that make it a lie ''per se''? (The following are additional problems which may not necessarily be reasons for deletion: Note that the article currently identifies only two "prevarications" made by any of the first 31 presidents. Unfortunately, I believe it is much more likely that editors will try to supply evidence of lies by Clinton, Bush, and Obama than by Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, and James Buchanan, thus leaving this article perpetually biased toward covering lies by the recent presidents. And the article has some irrelevant material, such as Parson Weems' myth about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, which was not said by Washington himself, but ''about'' him after his death, and Abraham Lincoln's joke about being "two-faced". Finally, the article contains an excessive number of footnotes used merely to prove the order of the presidents, which is in no dispute anyway
— User:Metropolitan90, 20:59, 31 December 2009 (UTC)
Stance: delete
Cited policy: WP:NPOV||WP:RECENT (Wikipedia:Neutral point of view)