There's a name for this argument Debbie Wasserman Schultz is making about Hillary Clinton's story of trying to enlist in the Marines.

It's "fake but accurate."

Watch the video of Andrea Mitchell pushing for an explanation for why Hillary is going around making this claim that's quite unlikely to be true and that WaPo's fact checker has given 2 Pinocchios. DWS begins by impugning the very asking of the question: "Why on earth are we talking about this?" Mitchell stands her ground. Obviously, we're talking about it because Hillary Clinton is using her personal story in her current campaigning for President. DWS shifts to presenting the story as illustrating something that is true (that women have struggled over the years with acceptance into the military). In that light, the details of whether the story is real doesn't matter as long as it works to understand a problem that is real.

ADDED: Here's the WaPo fact checker piece. It not only shows the fakeness of Hillary's story, but it also undermines the "fake but accurate" presentation, because it doesn't even illustrate the general problem accurately. Excerpt:

Women have been part of the Marines since 1918, and were deployed to Korea in the 1950s. “By the height of the Vietnam war... about 2,700 women Marines served... both stateside and overseas,” according to the Women Marines Association. “By 1975, the Corps approved the assignment of women to all occupational fields except infantry, artillery, armor and pilot/air crew.”

And: "A former Marine lawyer, who was actively recruiting for the JAG at the time, says it is 'ludicrous' to suggest someone with Clinton’s skills would have been rejected. Since the draft had ended, 'we were frantic for lawyers,' he said, declining to be identified. Neither age nor eyesight would have been issue, he added. Many of the newly recruited lawyers were at least 26 years old and eyesight was only an issue for pilots, he said."

"The researchers believe that verbosity in some ways might be a marker for deception because the person doing the lying is doing a lot to paint a picture that actually isn't true."

"It's worth pointing out here that different studies have produced different results on this, Steve, so context certainly matters. In analyses of online dating profiles, for example, people who lie about themselves have often been found to use shorter descriptions rather than longer descriptions. It could be because dating actually offers better fact checking. If you claim to be a rock climber but refuse to go rock climbing, you'll be very quickly found out.... On the other hand, in a presidential primary debate, politicians might throw out several hundred claims, most of which are not going to get fact checked. So politicians who might actually have greater latitude to stretch the truth."

From an NPR discussion titled "Researchers Examine How To Spot A Lying Politician."

This gets what is one of my favorite tags: clear speech.

"The Carson story is either a total fabrication or, if true, even worse — trying to hit mother over the head with a hammer or stabbing friend!"

Trump, tweeting, attacks Carson, and sharply reveals the weirdness of this particular accusation of dishonesty. The stories Carson has told about himself are not the usual resume padding. They're negative. You could say they're inherently believable, because why would a candidate tell tales against himself?

But the context of telling those stories was an autobiography written a quarter century ago. The tales of a violent temper lend drama to the narrative of impoverished childhood and salvation through religion. I'd like to know more about how this book was written and why. It was co-written by Cecil (Cec) Murphey, who's worked on other inspirational books, including "90 Minutes in Heaven," which doesn't sound as though it's rigorously framed in factual accuracy.

Salvation isn't very interesting if you are not a sinner. In the history of dishonest memoirs, what is more likely to be exaggerated and faked — the positive or the negative?