True lies
By 
This WSJ op-ed is a real classic of the genre, the genre being “Donald Trump is a sociopathic liar, but what about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Covid lockdowns?”
It’s pleasant at least to know that Fox opinion hosts, such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, had their wits about them on the evidence and the requirements of evidence. If as much attention were paid to revelations about other news outlets’ faulty handling of the Russia-collusion farce, Hunter Biden’s laptop or the FBI’s actions in the 2016 election, we might be getting somewhere now.
It’s a matter of public record, including most notably Donald Trump’s own public statements, that Trump campaign actually did collude with Russia during the 2016. It’s also a matter of public record that the FBI did its level best to get Donald Trump elected that year. As for “Hunter Biden’s laptop,” this phrase sums up the most bizarre current right wing fetish you can find outside Marjorie Taylor Greene’s hard drive.
Moving right along:
A question this column has wrestled with more than once: When are the lies of a disreputable and widely discredited figure like Mr. Trump a bigger danger to the republic than lies that receive the near-universal endorsement of the establishment and its institutions?
The moment is bigger than it seems. Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya have lent their names to a growing call for a Covid commission, also endorsed by this column, albeit for the limited purpose of examining the government’s pandemic messaging, though it may be a distinction without a difference.
All the questions Profs. Kulldorff and Bhattacharya ask could also be asked of the media, starting with the one at the bottom of it all: Why ignore or downplay the reality of mild and asymptomatic spread and its visible corollaries? From this mistake flowed so many misguided, inefficient pandemic actions aimed at protecting the least-at-risk, which almost certainly did more harm than good. From this also flowed so much of the false and manipulative messaging now rightly being criticized, about masks, natural immunity, vaccine risk and benefit, and even the likelihood of dying from Covid.
Why might anyone be more concerned about Donald Trump’s constant lies about trivial issues like who won the 2020 presidential election than about whether certain public health officials might have, given the benefit of hindsight, engaged in less than optimal messaging about how to handle an epidemic that has resulted in 1.5 million more dead Americans over the past three years than would have died but for that epidemic?
The difference between conservative lies and liberal lies is that the conservative lies are actually lies, while the liberal “lies” are truths — that Donald Trump colluded with Russia; that the FBI helped elect him; that the whole Hunter Biden laptop story has always been pure bullshit; that the Covid pandemic has been the worst public health disaster in American history, and required far more aggressive emergency measures than were ever actually implemented — that conservatives can’t acknowledge, because to be a conservative means above all that you can’t handle the truth.