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The big fact-checking outfits are out with their “lie of the year” lists. It’s the kind of end-of-year ritual I can appreciate — because it’s a salute to accountability. But this year I’ve been wondering if we can even handle the truth.
PolitiFact, a Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checker in Florida, gives its award for “the most significant falsehoods or exaggerations” that work to undermine reality. The list is national, so as you might guess Donald Trump has won it so many times PolitiFact might as well name it in his dishonor.
It also has chapters now in 11 states, but not one here, so sadly there is no annual fibbing award for Washington.
If there was, I think we all can guess who the winner this year might be: Gov. Jay Inslee, for his repeated wrong claims about gas prices.
“This is going to have a minimal impact, if any. Pennies,” Inslee infamously said about whether the state’s new “cap and invest” climate system would raise prices as the pump.
Or, this memorable line: “The oil and gas industry projections around any of this are halfway between hogwash and baloney.”
It turned out the industry projections were right — the impact was actually a lot of pennies, somewhere between 25 and 50 of them per gallon. After denying this for months, Inslee has retreated to saying he got a faulty estimate from the state Department of Ecology.
Regardless of whether this was spin or an error, it sold a hugely consequential policy. My sense is there’s little chance the climate bill would have passed through the Legislature as written had there been an open and accurate assessment of its costs at the gas pump. The truth — which is that shifting away from fossil fuels is going to be really expensive — would probably have killed it.
It may kill it yet, with an initiative now pending to force a public vote on the policy next year.
With “hogwash and baloney,” Inslee was guilty of political hyperbole. But do people even want truth? Fable and button-pushing lies sure seem to get a ton of traction.
Take Trump. He’s the favorite to win his third straight GOP nomination, even as his candidacy is based on the massive central lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. This lie is destroying everyone who comes into its orbit — see Rudy Giuliani for the latest sorry example. Yet it retains a hold on a sizable share of the country.
If Trump admitted he lost, would his power suddenly drain, like a modern-day Samson getting his hair cut?
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In local politics in 2023, we had such a case of a politician who told the truth.
It involved the Seattle City Council’s debacle with the issue of defunding the police.
To recap, in the summer of 2020 seven of nine council members rather rashly endorsed cutting the police budget by 50 percent, without a concrete plan for what to replace it with. They got started down that road, cutting about 13 percent. When officers began quitting in droves and crime soared, the movement face-planted.
Of the supporters, there was only one who publicly grappled with this fallout. That was Councilmember Andrew Lewis. “Fifty percent was a mistake,” he told The Seattle Times. “One regret that I have is, in retrospect, I never would have assigned a percentage.”
Here’s what happened to Lewis: Last month, he became the first Seattle City Council incumbent in eight years to lose a reelection bid.
Was that due to being honest? There’s no way to know for sure, as there were plenty of other factors at play. But it hardly seems a complete coincidence that the one politician in 2023 who ‘fessed up — who said “I regret” — was the one politician the voters chose to throw out.
Here’s to the effort, anyway — at least you tried the forthright route, Andrew Lewis.
Now for 2024, it’s looking like the political lie, along with its cousins spin and conspiracy and never admitting error, are going to put the truth on the run more than ever.
Because the hard truth about it? The truth just isn’t that popular.
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