If God created a large enough rock, our notion of lifting becomes meaningless, since lifting is generally viewed as moving an object away from a gravitational body. However, the Earth is too big to lift, because it dominates its local gravity field. People refer to Earth as a rock, though, so the Earth is a rock that is too big to lift. If it were to be near enough to another object that it could be lifted, both objects would distort, forming one much larger object. By its sheer size, the Earth is a rock too large to lift.

Humans use metaphor and other figures of speech to mean more than one thing, or to make their words more open to interpretation, because sometimes people mean more than one thing. Poetry is an entire art that makes heavy use of conveying ideas without saying them. In fact, a lot of poetry is inscrutable when viewed only literally.

Using such figures of speech in political debate, like talking about hollow points as you defined them, might be ill-advised. But then, for points like the ones you're talking about, the people making the arguments would have to agree they are hollow. I believe most of the people saying the president hasn't done enough to fix the economy believe the president has power and should have knowledge sufficient to fix the economy. False beliefs are probably more often at fault than intentional or knowing deception, and identifying them requires knowledge contradicting those false beliefs.

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