OPINION:
Democrat Terry McAuliffe is a liar.
He’s campaigning for governor of Virginia on a ship of lies about COVID-19 hospitalizations of children — making him also a liar of the worst kind: an exploiter of the most vulnerable.
His campaign of fear, thankfully, is crashing and burning.
“Terry McAuliffe keeps inflating coronavirus numbers,” The Washington Post just wrote in a fact-checker headline.
The takeaway from the fact-check?
McAuliffe’s Four Pinocchios.
From The Post: “We can understand the occasional misspeak, especially in the heat of a campaign. Moreover, as readers know, we generally do not award Pinocchios when a politician admits error. But this has happened too many times for McAuliffe’s language to be an accident.”
What’s the “this?”
McAuliffe’s lies.
The Post lists: On Sept. 28, McAuliffe claimed 8,000 coronavirus cases “yesterday” in the commonwealth, and repeated the number on Sept. 29 and again on Oct. 7. False.
“[W]hen we checked the records, you had to go back to January to find a single day when a combination of confirmed and probable cases in Virginia got close to 8,000,” The Post wrote. “On September 27, there were fewer than 2,000 confirmed cases.”
That was just the beginning.
The Post continued: On Oct. 7, McAuliffe claimed “8,000 cases” of coronavirus in Virginia, “just this week” — including the admission of “1,142 children … in ICU beds.” False. On Oct. 13, McAuliffe claimed “today, 1,100 children are in hospitals here in Virginia,” in the context of placing blame on rising COVID-19 numbers. False. On Oct. 13, McAuliffe claimed, ‘We just had 4,000 cases yesterday [of COVID-19] here in the Commonwealth … [with] 1,142 children in serious, in hospitals, in ICU beds.” False. On Oct. 23, McAuliffe claimed, “in Virginia, you should understand, 1,142 of our children have been in hospitals because they got COVID.” False.
False, false, false.
Stone-cold busted.
And by The Post, no less.
“In speaking about the threat of the coronavirus to the state, McAuliffe frequently touts numbers — often wrong numbers about the impact on children,” The Post wrote. “When we first queried the McAuliffe campaign about his figures, we were told it was a slip of the tongue. Okay, we understand that, and so we passed on a fact check. But then his tongue kept slipping.”
That’s a nice way of saying: McAuliffe is a freaking liar. An unabashed, bold-faced, devil-may-care-what-you-think liar.
For instance, when McAuliffe claimed in early October that 1,142 children were in ICU beds, ostensibly due to COVID-19, what he meant to say was that for “the week ended Oct. 2, the number of children in hospitals, not necessarily in intensive care, was just 35,” as The Post wrote.
This is not a simple tomato-tomahto affair.
This is a matter of morality.
Yes, politicians lie. Politicians from both major political parties lie. But McAuliffe, faltering in the polls, falling in favor with parents in Virginia who perhaps don’t like the way he thinks bureaucrats hold the authority to decide what kids get taught in public schools — not caretakers, not moms and dads, but bureaucrats — or the way he seems to dismiss, along with his Democrat cronies, the seriousness of little girls getting sodomized by pretend-girls infiltrating the bureaucratically enforced LGBTQ-friendly bathrooms — McAuliffe seems desperate to revive his campaign. He is desperate to revive his campaign.
So he’s brought in the Democratic Party big guns to assist — if former President Barack Obama and sleepy brain-dead President Joe Biden can be called the big guns, that is.
But big guns can’t conceal lying.
Lying is a moral failure. Repeated lying is a sign of unrepentant moral failure.
And that’s what McAuliffe is bringing to the political table: lies, deception and a willingness to use whatever tool available — from fear to children — to win the governor’s seat.
Virginia can do better.
America must do better.
When politicians blatantly lie, bold-facedly lie, they cede their grounds for higher office. And when liberal-leaning The Washington Post busts out a Democrat for lying with a Four Pinocchio rating in the final days of a tight campaign, right before voters head off to vote, you can bank on this: That Democrat is so morally bankrupt even his friends in the media can’t stomach his immorality.
This should make the Nov. 2 election in Virginia a no-brainer. Liar? Or not a liar. Remember the Pinocchios.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Socialists Don’t Sleep: Christians Must Rise Or America Will Fall,” is available by clicking HERE.
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