LIES

TRUMP 16

CLINTON 1

WASHINGTON ― The Commission on Presidential Debates has said that it doesn’t consider it a moderator’s duty to correct the lies or misstatements of a presidential candidate, so we’re going to try to do it ourselves.

In an era where most consumers now get their news from social media, The Huffington Post is still lucky enough to have millions of readers who come directly to our home page every day. When they get there tonight, they’ll be greeted with a lie counter that we’ll update in real time, lie by lie.

Not all lies, of course, are equal, and nobody can equal Donald Trump when it comes to lying. Clinton’s lies, meanwhile, tend to be more carefully crafted. The most tempted she gets to fib seems to be around the use of her damn emails and the subsequent investigation into the alleged mishandling of classified information. “Director [James] Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people,” Clinton has said, for instance, in a claim PolitiFact ranked Pants On Fire.

Trump lying about not having small hands (he does) is different than Trump lying about opposing the Iraq War (he didn’t). Sorting the weight of each lie isn’t realistic in real time, so our tally will link to a live blog that has broader context, and we’ll be doing plenty of fact-checking after the debate. It’s our hope, of course, that the counter still shows goose eggs when the debate draws to a close. But even if it does, one of the candidates will still be ... well, the editor’s note at the bottom of each story pretty much sums it up.

UPDATE: The AP did its own fact check of the various statements, and found 14 errors from Trump, and four from Clinton.

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.