Columnist: Reid contributed deceit

Chicago Tribune columnist Rex Huppke, who made a splash in April by declaring that factual information is dead, cites U.S. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada as evidence that things got no better as the year wore on.

“To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet,” Huppke wrote in an obituary published April 20. “Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of the U.S. House of Representatives are communists. Facts held on for several days after that assault—brought on without a scrap of evidence or reason—before expiring peacefully at its home in a high school physics book. Facts was 2,372. … Facts was born in ancient Greece, the brainchild of famed philosopher Aristotle. … Facts is survived by two brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and a sister, Emphatic Assertion.”

Huppke, looking back on the year’s political campaign, told the American Journalism Review that Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s claim that Jeep was sending its U.S. jobs to China, Reid’s unsubstantiated claim that Romney failed to pay taxes for a decade, and Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s train wreck of an acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention showed that it’s becoming “impossible to really keep on top of what’s happening and what’s right and wrong.”

Reid never produced evidence for his claim, and Romney’s release of tax information tended to suggest that Reid was wrong.