It’s not that liberals don’t lie in other calendar years, but 2022 was a special annus indeed.
Sure, there was no, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky” moment. If something like that was sprang upon President Joe Biden, we also ought to face the facts — he wouldn’t remember anyway.
But, we did have us quite the bushel of little lies. Jussie Smollett was sentenced. Economic figures were fudged. Recession was redefined. And whatever Joe Biden said that was extremely problematic, the White House assured us, he never really uttered. Also, don’t ask any questions about what happened at Paul Pelosi’s house. Any.
From this list of hits, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson said four lies in particular stood out this year as the biggest and boldest: the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline, the “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Sam Bankman-Fried and inflation.
“This was the year of lying. The people in charge tell an awful lot of lies. That’s what we learned, and we know this for sure, because while they are avid and committed liars, they’re not very good at it,” Carlson said on his Friday show.
“Their lies are amateurish, obvious, pathetic, sad — and there’s something kind of insulting about that. Don’t take a leak on my boots and tell me it’s raining, goes the old cowboy phrase. Don’t tell me something we both know isn’t true and expect me to believe it.”
First on the list was what Carlson called “what might be the dumbest lie ever told: Vladimir Putin blew up his own natural gas pipeline to Europe.”
In September, when the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines from Russia to Europe started leaking and it became clear the leaks were obviously sabotage, the media immediately pointed their fingers to Moscow in unison, shouting: “J’accuse!”
And if you thought about it for two seconds — and only two seconds — the theory made sense. It was a bit like Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés burning his boats upon arrival in the new world. There was no way back: victory or death.
If you thought about this for more than two seconds, however, the parallels to Cortés stopped looking so clear. Not that many people did; Carlson was one who questioned the official narrative and was labeled a Kremlin sympathizer for it.
However, the logic suggesting Russia was behind the explosions that sabotaged Nord Stream didn’t make any sense: “By doing this, Putin crippled his own economy and weakened his own strategic position in the middle of a war, but he did it anyway because well, just because that’s the kind of evil behavior Vladimir Putin is famous for,” Carlson said, sarcastically.
“He’s so evil. He’s not only a threat to us — a direct physical peril to Omaha, Bangor and San Jose — Vladimir Putin is so evil, he’s an existential threat to himself. Stop that man before he blows up more of his own pipelines. That’s what the media told us with a completely straight face.”
And not just the media. Here’s the words of John Brennan, former CIA director and Trump-baiter extraordinaire: “I think this is clearly an act of sabotage of some sort, and Russia is certainly the most likely suspect … I think this might be just the first salvo of some additional things that might be coming toward Europe.”
“Russia is certainly the most likely suspect, says John Brennan — and you can trust him when he says that, because John Brennan was Barack Obama’s CIA director,” Carlson said. “There’s nothing shady about that guy. He’s never been involved in any illegal murders or anything. He’s got your best interests at heart.”
“And actually, John Brennan turns out to be reliable in at least one sense,” he continued. “If John Brennan says it, the opposite is almost certainly true, and that was the case here. No, Russia did not blow up its own pipelines. That explosion was the work of the Biden administration. They signed off on it, and we can tell you that tonight with confidence.”
That last part is more conjecture than anything, it’s worth noting — but as for the rest of it, yeah, pretty much. Last Wednesday, even The Washington Post was forced to admit that, while “world leaders quickly blamed Moscow for a brazen and dangerous act of sabotage” in the wake of the explosions, “after months of investigation, numerous officials privately say that Russia may not be to blame after all for the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines.”
“‘There is no evidence at this point that Russia was behind the sabotage,’ said one European official, echoing the assessment of 23 diplomatic and intelligence officials in nine countries interviewed in recent weeks.”
Then there was the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” when it came to COVID-19.
Dr. Leana Wen, the far-left, former Planned Parenthood head and current CNN contributor, was once a proponent of tying “reopening policy to vaccination status” for public health reasons, saying the unvaccinated needed to be told “here are all these freedoms that you have” if you got the jab — at least in March of 2021.
“Now we know that everything Leana Wen told us on CNN was a lie — and we know that for certain, because, amazingly, Leana Wen just admitted it,” Carlson said. “This week, Wen acknowledged that actually this is not a pandemic of the unvaccinated. It’s the opposite.
“The CDC, she said, has now determined that ‘vaccinated people who never had COVID were at least three times as likely to be infected as unvaccinated people with a prior infection, and a Lancet study found that those who were vaccinated but never had COVID were four times as likely to have a severe illness, resulting in hospitalization or death compared to the unvaccinated who recovered from it.'”
Whoops. No wonder the left is now calling for “COVID amnesty.”
The third biggest lie, just three letters long: SBF. Or, as Carlson described the founder and CEO of the bankrupt financial company/likely ponzi scheme FTX, “this weird, pudgy kid in a t-shirt who played video games during interviews, took a ton of pills and could never quite explain the business model of his ‘crypto exchange.’
“I mean, literally, from the first day, this guy was an utterly transparent scam artist. Your golden retriever could have smelled the fraud on this guy. It was that redolent,” Carlson said.
Which means, of course, the media could never smell it.
One CNBC pundit said Bankman-Fried was “the J.P. Morgan of Crypto.” Another: “The Michael Jordan of crypto, if you will.” Another — this one being Jim Cramer, who is to finance what John Brennan is to matters of intelligence — said SBF was the “J.P. Morgan of this generation … Is he the Jay Gould of our era, or is he the J.P, Morgan of our era? … Is he Vanderbilt?”
No. The crypto king and Democrat donor was Madoff, if the allegations against him are true. And, as usual, this wasn’t stuff pulled up from depths of the archives: “That wasn’t 10 years ago. That was weeks, days, before the Sam Bankman-Fried fraud collapsed in on itself,” Carlson said.
Finally, inflation — the lie that got bigger right along with your food bill.
“Inflation is demonstrable. Anyone who claims otherwise is lying, and everybody knows that, and that’s why even most politicians, people who lie about anything, don’t bother to lie about inflation,” Carlson said. “It’s just too easy to catch them, but some still persist in lying about it. They just enjoy the experience of lying. It makes them feel alive. [Secretary of the Treasury] Janet Yellen is one of those. Watch her here tell you that the inflation you’re experiencing every day is not real. It’s a mirage. It’s ‘transitory.'”
And there she was, in all of her glory, telling us in the summer and autumn of 2021 that high inflation numbers were transitory. The highest the inflation rate was during any of the period covered by those clips was 6.2 percent year-over-year, according to data from the Bureau for Labor Statistics. In November 2022, that number was 7.1 percent — and President Joe Biden’s administration was celebrating because this was actually down from a high of 9.1 percent.
Historic job creation.
Early signs that inflation is easing.
Unemployment near a 50-year low.
Gas prices under what they were a year ago.I’m so optimistic about our future.
— President Biden (@POTUS) December 10, 2022
And, yes, there were plenty of lies that got told because 2022 was a midterm year. However, remember that, thanks to the elongated presidential campaign cycle, 2023 is already a campaign year. Snoozing though he may appear to be, President Biden has a phalanx of Democrats diligently plotting deceitfulness, and most of them even know it.
If that’s not a bummer of a new year’s revelation, I don’t know what is.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
