Lying Becomes Routine

   Once upon a time, journalists refrained from using the L word. Now, however, the president lies so much, so often, so blatantly, about stuff so easily disproven that the constant trail of nonsense cannot be ignored.
   Currently, he is proclaiming that the reason Democrats talk so much about allegations of Russian meddling in the recent election is that it's "just an excuse for the biggest loss in the history of politics."
   Yes, Donald Trump became president, and whether that was partly because of outside help and rigging the vote, is still under investigation. But was that loss by the Democratic candidate "the biggest loss in the history of politics"?
   No, it was not. By any measure, he's wrong. Yet he persists in spreading this lie along the many others that he has spewed almost every day since inauguration.
   Fact: The biggest loss in U.S. political history was in 1936, when Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Alf Landon. The tally was 532 electoral votes for Roosevelt, and just eight for Landon.
   Moreover, the fact remains that Trump lost the popular vote by a margin of nearly 3 million votes, despite his claim that he would have won the popular vote but for nearly 5 million fraudulent votes allegedly cast by illegal immigrants, with all of them going to the Democratic candidate, and not for him.
   Other news outlets have kept a tally of Trump's lies, which come almost daily and will soon become book length in their number.
   Meanwhile, as disheartening as it may be for reporters to write about them and for voters to hear them, it's important that the stream of misleading "alternative facts" and downright lies be exposed as often as they are spewed.
   That's part of the job of a free press.