PolitiFact’s ‘Lie of the Year’ and its impact on the Ohio town caught in the middle | PBS News https://t.co/ICRRswZ3DE
— Paul Epps (@paulepps) December 31, 2024
According to PolitiFact, the Lie of the Year is that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH, were eating dogs and cats.
First of all, I’d like to see someone convince me that statement is a lie. I can’t prove that it’s true, but I have seen videos of Springfield citizens at city council meetings saying that it’s true.
How can PolitiFact say definitively that it’s a lie? There aren’t any missing cats or dogs in Springfield? What happened to them?
And secondly, even if it’s false, it’s trivial.
Here are some candidates for Lie of the Year, selected by me.
- “I will not pardon my son.” This was said by Joe Biden, then propagated by other Democrats and the media to exemplify that Biden is a true American who believes in democracy, not like Donald Trump. And then Biden pardoned his son anyway.
- Joe Biden’s decision to step aside as a presidential candidate was an act of selfless patriotism. Actually, party elites and mega-donors took him behind the barn and shot him.
But by far the biggest lie of the year, and perhaps the most ambitious coverup in the history of the country, was the lie that Joe Biden was mentally competent to be president, to fulfill the duties of the office, to serve and protect the American people.
Who’s been running the country?!
Who’s been making decisions to send tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to fund shooting wars in Ukraine and the Middle East? Who’s been handing out record numbers of presidential pardons?
I now feel my use of the word “coverup” to describe this scandal was inadequate. Everyone saw the daily videos of the president falling down, mumbling incoherently, wandering around lost and confused. We were told that those videos were fakes, posted by far-right conspiracy nuts. Behind closed doors, out of camera range, Biden was sharp as a tack, can’t keep up with him.
Maintaining this web of lies required the active cooperation of countless government officials and media members. As Matt Taibbi has said, “Is there even a word for fraud on that scale?”
PolitiFact also has a readers’ poll for Lie of the Year. The winner of the readers’ poll? Also the dogs and cats story, with 54 percent of the vote.
Of the three options I’ve listed here, the only one in the readers’ Top Ten is the “I will not pardon” lie, with 6 percent of the vote.