If you took all the lies out of political rhetoric, how much would be left? Apparently even less than usual this year. The latest, and perhaps biggest, lie — thus far — is that Donald Trump was cheated out of delegates in Colorado because the voters did not select the delegates.

Two very different questions have gotten confused with each other. One question is whether this is the best way to choose delegates. Most of us would say, “No,” but most of us don’t live in Colorado, and each state is allowed great leeway in how it chooses to pick its delegates. The more fundamental question is whether this was some trick cooked up to deprive Donald Trump of the delegates needed to win the Republican nomination. That is of course how Donald Trump and his followers automatically depict anything that doesn’t work out to his advantage. But the Colorado rules were written and known to all before anybody cast a single vote in the primary elections, anywhere in the country.

If the people who ran the Trump campaign were not aware of what the rules in Colorado were, and Ted Cruz’s people were, that is what happens when you hire people who are not up to the challenges of their job. The fact that one of those people has been fired and replaced has gotten much less media attention than Trump’s loudly repeated charges that he was robbed. With so many primary-election rules that vary from one state to another, some of these rules are bound to work out to one candidate’s advantage and another candidate’s disadvantage.

When Trump, for example, wins less than a majority of a state’s votes and yet gets 100 percent of its delegates, you don’t hear other candidates yelling or whining that they have been robbed. But the cold fact is that Trump’s percentage of the delegates is still higher than his percentage of the people who actually voted for him. Apparently it all depends on whose ox is gored — and who yells the loudest, with the most irresponsible charges. It also depends on how conscientious the media are and how gullible the voters are.

Other political-campaign lies have been repeated so often, over so many years, that they have become part of a tradition that is almost never questioned. Demands for “equal pay” for women, for example, proceed without even a definition of what that means. Some years ago, I was shocked when my research turned up the fact that young male physicians earned substantially more than young female physicians. But, when my research also turned up the fact that young male physicians work hundreds of hours more per year than young female physicians, it was not shocking any more.

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Source: Thomas Sowell, nationalreview.com