I'm starting to get my feathers ruffled by Donald Trump. And by that I mean he's starting to irritate me with his daily rants against the media.
Trump just loves to talk about the untrustworthy media, a claim he's likely repeated hundreds of times on the campaign trail. On Wednesday, he called the media "dishonest" and followed that Thursday by saying the media "never shows crowds."
Trump's claim the media never shows crowds was the latest labeled false by PolitiFact, a nonpartisan group which judges the truth of political statements.
For the record, Trump has received the worst ranking by PolitiFact and has been dubbed the most dishonest politician in America since 2007.
Trump's dishonesty is really quite alarming and the ease at which he rattles off inaccurate information is certainly disturbing. But through it all, he continually points a very small finger from one of his very small hands at the media.
PolitiFact has an interesting way of ranking political statements. The worst lies fall under a category called "Pants on Fire."
According to PolitiFact, here are how Trump's statements are ranked:
• Pants on Fire 17%
• False 34%
• Mostly False 19%
• Half True 15%
• Mostly True 11%
• True  4%
According to what Donald Trump would call my dishonest math, because I'm a member of the media, his statements are at least mostly false 70 percent of the time.
Trump was certainly misleading Sunday morning when he took to his favorite sounding board -- Twitter -- to complain about how Hillary Clinton stories were being played.
Tweeted Trump, "Twitter, Google and Facebook are burying the FBI criminal investigation of Clinton. Very dishonest media!"
Several news outlets were quick to disprove the validity of Trump's claim and PolitiFact labeled it "false." That's because the FBI email inquiry of Clinton was atop Google News. FBI director James Comey's name was atop Facebook in its "trending" box. And Twitter featured a major story about the FBI investigation.
But here's the real problem. People believe Trump's nonsense, don't bother checking it for themselves, and then pass along wrong information as the truth.
Trump's incorrect claim the Hillary FBI investigation was buried was retweeted about 25,000 times. Nearly 50,000 people "liked" it. The tweet closed as Trump's most popular of the day. And it was false.
The scary part for me is a guy who is dishonest 70% of the time and who tells the complete truth a mere 4% of the time, is going to easily carry Tennessee on Tuesday.
I cannot tell a lie. That really concerns me.
Standard editor James Clark can be reached at 473-2191.