Truth Is The Devil's Volleyball

I'm not one who thinks that political rhetoric needs to robbed of all color. There's room for hyperbole and exaggeration, for anecdotes which aren't quite literally true, and of course for humor. All of these things might bend the truth a bit, but they can be used without any real intent to deceive. Not every slight deviation from the truth makes you a liar. Still it's perfectly fair for the press to point out if, for example, Joe Biden says, "Mitt Romney literally makes 400 gazillion dollars per month," that such a statement is not, in fact, true. But it's a different kind of falsehood - humorous exaggeration combined with a nonsense word and Biden's regular abuse of the word "literally" - than falsehoods which are really meant to deceive people.