Palin revives “death panel” claim

By Dan Brooks in lying 6 Comments

Sarah Palin, sports anchor, 1988. You actually don’t need to put siding on the inside of the building.

Remember when Sarah Palin—fresh from her stint as the thing that proved John McCain was no longer reasonable—said that the Affordable Care Act would create “death panels”? That’s a service she provides. When the country can’t decide how it feels about an important piece of legislation, Palin is there to give us a false understanding of what it does. Her claim that faceless government bureaucrats would decide whether Grandma’s blood thinner is worth it was Politifact’s 2009 Lie of the Year. Pretty much everyone agrees that it exemplified the worst of contemporary politics, which makes it odd that she brought it up yesterday. Just in time for the Supreme Court’s ruling on Obamacare, Palin says her infamous lie was true all along.

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Annals of Lying: Priest’s PC autoplays gay porn during presentation

By Dan Brooks in lying 2 Comments

Father Martin McVeigh, who has no idea how gay pornography even got on his computer.

Once, when I worked as a tutor for prep school kids, one of my students woke his laptop from sleep and went to use the bathroom while it was starting up. Pretty much as soon as he left the room, the computer began playing blowjob footage—grainy and extremely loud, in that sensory-assault style where pornography meets the industrial film. I went for command-Q like a damn mongoose, only to get the spinning beach ball, at which point I panicked and shut the clamshell. That was no good, of course; my student would inevitably return, open it and have even more reason to assume I had fired up the hardcore porn while he was gone. I woke the laptop and waited for Closeup Wailing Blowjob 6 to start again—watching the bathroom door in terror the whole time—and then did a hard shutdown. My point is A) no pun and B) even the shrewd tactician is at a loss when a machine suddenly begins emitting pornography. I can understand why Father Martin McVeigh of Pomeroy, Ireland just got the fuck out of there.

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The right to lie in Ohio

By Dan Brooks in lying 3 Comments

Mark Miller of Cincinnati, classing it up on a hated streetcar

You narrowly missed having the headline A streetcar named The Liar inflicted upon you this morning, but at long last, it turns out I have some decency.  The man using the Ohio heybuddy to straighten his glasses above is Mark Miller, and he hates a trolley. Last year, when the City of Cincinnati wanted to build and operate several of same, Miller launched a campaign supporting a ballot initiative to stop the project. The New York Times offers an example of one of his rallying tweets:

 15% of Cincinnati’s Fire Dept browned out today to help pay for a streetcar boondoggle. If you think it’s a waste of money, VOTE YES on 48.

How we all hate a boondoggle! Surprisingly, though, Miller found himself in the midst of a donnybrook. In turns out that several of his statements, including the one above, were not what logicians call “true.” It also turns out that Ohio law forbids making false statements in support of a political campaign, and Miller became the object of a complaint with the state election commission. That complaint was dismissed—and Cincinnati is building that damn streetcar—but Miller remains scarred. “I’ve got to second-guess myself every time I sit down in front of a computer,” he told the Times. “Maybe I should moderate my stance, so I don’t get involved in an expensive action.”

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Social conservatives try to make satire fun again

By Dan Brooks in lying 4 Comments

Larry Doyle, former Simpsons writer and author of an "anti-Catholic screed."

One consolation of our progressive national stupefaction is that satire might start fooling people again. Not that Larry Doyle’s recent column on “the Jesus-eating cult of Rick Santorum” is particularly subtle. When Doyle describes himself as a former “Irish-Catholic, the worst kind” and says he discovered a possible connection between the RCC and NAMBLA “after conducting some research on the internet,” we see the flapping flag of irony country. Here lies the problem of satire within an educated society: pretty much everybody is smart enough to get it. That’s good, but it also takes some fun out of the conceit that someone, somewhere, is taking the irony seriously. It’s like a practical joke that everyone is in on; we all have to just look at the cup of pee and imagine how funny it would be if someone drank it. Lucky for us, Tony Perkins cannot resist free lemonade.

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Norway shooter praises Geller in manifesto

By Dan Brooks in lying 1 Comment

Anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller, who requires only a few drops of precious blood.

When a federal building exploded in Oslo on Friday, anti-Islam blogger and 2010 Combat! Worst Person In the World (Cheap Hustler Division) Pamela Geller quickly proclaimed “Jihad in Norway?” She followed it up with a stern lecture on the consequences of ignoring jihad—which she loosely defines as the continued existence of Islam—and a link to this fun item, titled “Norway: ALL rapes in last 5 years committed by Muslims.” Geller is a professional bigot, so it’s important for her to jump on such news items as they emerge. Possibly because all available Muslims were scrambling to cover Norway’s rape quota, however, Friday’s attacks were not carried out by Islamic terrorists. They were carried out by Christian terrorist Anders Breivik, whose 1,500-page manifesto cites Geller by name.

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