Tuesday, January 24, 2017

by

Abby Zimet, staff writer

Welcome to the future. By Tim O'Brien

Social media and wiseacres everywhere are having a fine old time with the DerGropenFuhrer's latest pants-on-fire atrocity after mini-me Kellyanne Conway defended their absurd inauguration numbers as #Alternative Facts. So it is we've newly learned that Yoko Ono broke up the Monkees, icebergs are disappearing from polar bears eating them, Trump is America's first black astronaut, everything is working properly, and 12 gazillion Trump supporters showed up for the coronation but we couldn't see them because they were tiny/shy/wearing Hogwarts' invisibility cloaks, and other fascinating #Spicer Facts.

Finally, they may have gone too far. Though Chuck Todd of Meet the Press needs to replace the ever-so-polite "falsehood" with the more-to-the-point "lie," mainstream media might actually, if woefully belatedly, be starting to do their job by increasingly calling out CheetoBenito's fictions. Editors are rushing to insistently correct the deliberate distortions, The New York Times is leading Trump stories with the word "lies," others are suggesting the press simply refuse to give Conway airtime, and even right-wing sources like Fox, The Blaze and the Daily Caller are sticking to the dispiriting facts. As sales of Orwell's 1984 soar in recognition of the growing dystopia, Dan Rather warns that "the press has never seen anything like this before," and needs to step up to stop it.

"We can all step up and say simply and without equivocation, 'A lie, is a lie, is a lie!' And if someone won't say it, those of us who know that there is such a thing as the truth must do whatever is in our power to diminish the liar's malignant reach into our society....Facts and the truth are not partisan. They are the bedrock of our democracy. And you are either with them, with us, with our Constitution, our history, and the future of our nation, or you are against it."

More Alternative facts:

From Boing Boing

Massive inaugural crowds

Happily married couple

Alternative Pets

Alternative Toys

The Press Joins the Real World