You can't beat Trump in a lying contest

Politifact got it right with its "lie of the year" award.

Robby Soave calls out Politifact for calling Donald Trump’s “eating the dogs” stuff as the “Lie of the Year,” arguing that it should have gone to those who insisted Joe Biden was sharp as ever until that debate let us judge for ourselves:

In 2024, PolitiFact's Lie of the Year is the claim by Trump that Haitian migrants in an Ohio town were "eating people's pets."

"With a brazen disregard for facts, Donald Trump and his running mate repeatedly peddled a created story that in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants were eating pet dogs and cats," observes the organization.

The Republican ticket's disregard for the facts in this case was indeed brazen. It was completely untrue that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people's pet dogs and cats. What happened was that various concerns about migrants supposedly hunting birds in public parks in Springfield, Ohio, got lumped together with an unrelated story of someone killing a pet cat in a completely different town. It's a textbook example of why you shouldn't automatically believe everything you see on social media. Trump and Vance did real harm here, and it's absolutely fair to call them out for smearing the immigrant population of Springfield, Ohio.

But was this really the Lie of the Year?

[…]

The lie, peddled at the behest of Biden's aides and advisers, and sold by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to a gullible and incurious mainstream media, was that President Biden remained fit for office—and that mounting public concerns about his age-related decline were based on misinformation. Well before Biden's historic collapse at the June presidential debate, a majority of Americans expressed serious reservations about Biden's ability to serve. When reporters pressed Biden's media surrogates about these polls, they insisted that the supposed evidence of the president's decline was being fabricated by his political enemies. Jean-Pierre thunderously attacked conservative media, and Fox News in particular, for circulating what she described as misleading videos that appeared to show Biden out of sorts.

At the highest levels of the Biden administration, the official word was: Don't believe your lying eyes. And for the most part, the mainstream media bought it.

Soave makes a good case, but I have to go with Politifact on this one.

President Biden presumably has his good days alongside his bad ones, and it’s not like the loudest voices insisting he was too senile to run for a second term (or even finish out his first) had the best track record or reputation for honesty.

Biden’s alleged age-defying mental and professional competence was at least more believable than hysterical, racist rumors about a minority group stealing and eating pets.

That’s not to say those who knew just how much Biden had declined were right to keep it under wraps. Just the opposite: when Biden stumbled onto the debate stage in June, I felt a mixture of pity, sadness, anger and betrayal as I witnessed just how much the President had declined, while the likes of Joe Scarborough had assured me he was sharper than ever.

And this is from the perspective of someone who’d vowed not to support Trump under any circumstances. I can only imagine how more persuadable voters must have felt.

Actually, we do know how they felt, because Donald Trump will be returning to the highest office in the land in, gulp, less than three weeks. And the Springfield thing has been quietly dropped, without apology nor explanation, by the MAGAbots who pushed it.

Team Biden was punished for its lies, while Team Trump got away with theirs. That, more than anything, is why Trump’s “lie of the year” award is so richly deserved.

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A gift to Germany’s far-right party

When I saw this tweet, my first instinct was to be surprised that the controversial Alternative fur Deutschland was being excluded from the party leaders’ debates for the upcoming German election, considering its high levels of support and, more recently, the endorsement of the world’s richest man.