Now, if you want to talk about what NSA and CIA chiefs say to the U.S. Congress under oath, there are tons of lies there.
Have you run for political office before? Perhaps that is your source of authority for your claims.
Consider a career ("special class") that we (hopefully) agree on where being dishonest is required to succeed. An illusionist, or a spy / secret agent.
Do they think differently about truth than most people?
Well yes, of course they do. I can think of at least two reasons: self-selection and habit+experience.
All three examples do so for different specific reasons, and in different ways.
For the illusionist and the spy, I guess that's what we expect of people doing those jobs. For politicians, not so much.
Even then, if you look closely, there's still quite often a clear and outright lie, just cushioned in "equivocating language" (nice term, btw). It's just that all the cushioning tends to make pointing out the lie within seem like a petty thing to do. And in the case of politician-to-politicians they tend not to do that to each other because they recognize the game being played and rather not risk getting theirs in turn. If it does happen, it gets ugly fast, and both parties are worse off.
BTW I don't disagree that there's also a large amount of "equivocating language" going on, without any outright lies in the middle of it. Maybe that's even more common. Doesn't mean they don't lie, quite a lot more than people whose career doesn't depend on it.
Also (but this is just opinion) if "equivocating language" is used to deliberately give people / the public a wrong idea, that's not far from lying either. Even if it's "technically" true.
And then there's still quite a large number of politicians, on all sides of the spectrum, left/right, popular or not, powerful or not, that I have seen knowingly speaking some pretty damn big lies, and not seeing any consequences for it.
> Maybe their lies are just more public. They're all humans, after all.
...your evidence is your previous, unproven argument.
Politicians lie, humans lie, and politicians are humans. Unless there's some strong evidence, claiming that politicians lie more than the average human makes no sense.
- Politicians lie much more than an average person.
- Sales and marketing people lie more than politicians.