on Truthiness

"Hillary Clinton's embarrassed writhings after it was revealed that she had not actually come under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996 are emblematic of this strange melding of fact and imagination. In her own mind Mrs Clinton did not lie, or even exaggerate, but rather “misspoke”. Appropriating the broader reality of a situation for political gain was nothing more than a “minor blip”...

...At all levels of the culture, the ability to spin a good yarn is valued more highly than its veracity...There is even a new word for this sort of fakery: “truthiness”. Coined by the American television comedian Stephen Colbert, truthiness describes anything that a person claims to know intuitively without regard to actual experience, evidence or the facts. In Colbert's words: “We're not talking about truth, we're talking about something that seems like truth - the truth we want to exist.” When Mrs Clinton remembered dodging the bullets in Bosnia, she was indulging in truthiness, adopting an experience she wanted to be true."