Toward the end of every year, fact-checking organisation PolitiFact announces what has been selected as the “Lie of the Year” — and the outlet’s 2024 selection, at best, strains credulity.
“A lie marked a town and its residents in the name of campaign rage. It was absurd. It was consequential. Our Lie of the Year goes to Donald Trump and JD Vance for false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pet dogs and cats,” a post on X read when the selection was announced.
But the outlet’s “Lie of the Year” is not even something they can definitively prove is untrue. Earlier in the year, a number of reports had circulated about the small town of Springfield, Ohio — a town which had been inundated with large numbers of Haitian migrants — suggesting that migrants had taken and eaten ducks they found at local parks. Other reports indicated that some of the migrants were eating domesticated animals such as dogs and cats. Trump — and Vance, who served as a U.S. Senator from Ohio — had simply repeated the reports as they heard them.
But what about the lies that have been proven to be untrue? Which of those might rise to the level of “Lie of the Year?”
If one were to take a consensus on the matter from X, the answer might be one of President Joe Biden’s more obvious whoppers: his repeated insistence that he would not issue a pardon for his embattled son, Hunter Biden.
Not only is it clear that Biden lied about his plan to pardon Hunter, it was also later revealed that the White House made a coordinated effort to push that lie until the last possible moment. But while a handful of the most loyal Democrat mouthpieces continued to defend Biden and gaslight the American people — claiming that it wasn’t really a lie — Biden’s promise not to pardon Hunter does not quite rise to “Lie of the Year” status.
An honorable mention should go to Biden’s claim that he would not drop out of the 2024 presidential race — a statement that was proved false when he did just that in late July, foisting Vice President Kamala Harris on the party that had rejected her bid for the 2020 presidential nomination.
“Kamala Harris is not and never was the Border Czar” should also rate a mention, particularly because left-leaning media outlets like Axios were forced to undermine their own reporting — which had labeled her the Border Czar when she was first charged with addressing the “root causes” of the crisis at the southern border — in their effort to claim that she had never, in fact, had that job.
The real “Lie of the Year” wasn’t just one lie, but a whole litany of lies, all based on a carefully coordinated deception authored by the White House and eagerly parroted by Democrats and their media surrogates: Joe Biden is fine.
Biden, by his own admission, has never been the most eloquent of speakers. But when his routine verbal foibles crossed the line from simple gaffes to obvious cognitive impairment, his administration either pretended nothing had happened, made excuses, or simply edited the White House transcript to “fix” what he’d said.
When anyone dared to question Biden’s fitness for office, friendly media personalities like the hosts of ABC’s “The View” complained of “ageism” and then reminded their audience that President-elect Donald Trump is almost as old as Biden.
In March of 2024, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough went to the mat for Biden, saying, “Start your tape right now, because I’m about to tell you the truth. And F you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second, and I’ve known him for years, the Brzezinskis have known him for 50 years.”
When Biden was caught on video wandering away from other world leaders — when he was supposed to remain where he was for a photo — the White House referred to the uncut and unedited video as a “cheap fake” designed to make Biden look bad. Legacy media could not pick up their buckets and carry the administration’s water fast enough.
After Biden’s disastrous debate performance on CNN, the White House claimed that he had been suffering from a cold — and despite a few calls from some in media suggesting it was time for Biden to step aside, the majority played along.
Even after longtime Democrat donor and actor George Clooney called on Biden to step aside — and reports circulated that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and former President Barack Obama were leading the charge to oust Biden as the candidate — the White House insisted he was fine and was going nowhere. The ladies on “The View,” rather than acknowledging Biden’s obvious cognitive decline, scolded Clooney.
It was not until July 21 — when Biden issued a statement via social media announcing his plan to exit the race — that any real cracks began to form in the media’s protective wall around the 46th president.
And it wasn’t until after Vice President Kamala Harris had decisively lost her bid to succeed him in the White House that The Wall Street Journal published its lengthy report on just how deep the cover-up — in which Harris had certainly participated — had gone.
Despite all that, President Biden himself still appears unwilling to let go of the lie: The Washington Post reported recently that Biden has said he regrets dropping out of the race, and insists that he could have beaten Trump.
As CBS News correspondent Jan Crawford noted on Sunday, “I think that is either delusional or they are gaslighting.”
PolitiFact, it should be noted, has made a few correct calls in the past — with the most obvious example being 2013. That year, the award went to former President Barack Obama’s Obamacare-pushing tall tale: “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”
No comments:
Post a Comment