I recall AOC said Ted Cruz was trying to kill her in late January. Was she lying?
I think for something to qualify as a lie it must be known to be false by the person who made it.
So, I wonder how one could unambiguously prove on the basis of the facts that AOC has knowingly asserted a falsehood here? I can think of more than one chain of evidence and reasoning that would lead me to believe that is possible. But I can also think of other chains that would lead me to believe it is possible she did not.
For instance, I think anyone, including AOC, can figure out that an experienced and skilled politician like Cruz is most likely aware of what can happen if he participates in ginning up already hateful and fearful people with language that can easily be interpreted by them as calls for revolutionary violence against their political enemies.
That's what Cruz had been doing for some considerable while right up to a day or two before 1/6. (Some say he was competing with Josh Hawley to see who could become the favorite darling and leader of the right, post-Trump.) So, it seems conceivable that Cruz anticipated the possibility of a violent attack on the Capitol Building while AOC and other lawmakers were present, and even that such an attack could easily lead to AOC's murder.
If he didn't think of it himself, there were numerous people who did, and who warned of such likelihoods in the days before 1/6. For Cruz not to have heard of those findings assumes that not only he never came across any of the warnings, but no one on his staff or among his colleagues thought to tell him about any. I can't believe that is likely.
Well, that's a start. I don't want to write a novella, so I'll leave it at that, but I think anyone can dig into it and find there's some ambiguity here about whether AOC knew she was asserting a falsehood when she said Cruz tried to kill her. But there's something even more to the point here. If she knew it was not entirely provable that Cruz tried to kill her -- no inside information, for instance, that might confirm it to her -- then was she exaggerating or lying out of whole cloth?
Again, I'm just giving a rough draft of several possible chains of evidence and logic that might be applied here to reach an overall conclusion that we cannot reasonably be sure AOC was lying, or if she was lying, whether her lie is cut from whole cloth, or partially true.
Last, if anyone in the past has cut Trump any slack on the grounds they thought no one could be reasonably certain of Trump's meanings, then please feel free to explain how their reasons for cutting Trump slack might apply or not apply here as well.
In 2016, Kellyanne Conway declared the right lives in a new age, an age of "Alternative Facts". Fine, the right lives in an Age of Alternative Facts, now. But does the right also live in an Age of "Alternative Logic", too?