Post-Truth. Post-Fact. Half-Truths. Alt-Truth. Fake-News. Call it what you will – just don’t call it ‘LIES’.

We’ve all railed at 2016 for taking from us many loved and admired actors and musicians; however, the reality is that the Grim Reaper seems to have inexorably wielded his scythe over The Truth too.

It started with Brexit and the “Let’s Fund Our NHS Instead” untruthful slogan splashed on the side of a double-decker. Then we smoothly moved onto Trump and … everything he’s ever said.  From his election deceitful promise that he’s self-funding his own campaign, to his relentless self-aggrandising, and now to the Freudian size of his inauguration crowd. “Post-Truth Politics” shouted the world – “we can say what we want and people will believe it! The onus is on The People to sift through what is true and what isn’t!”

And here on our little island we’re no strangers to bare-faced lies either. We’ve been through ‘The power station will be ready tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’, to ‘The selection process was fair and above board’, to ‘I don’t have a company in Panama’ then ‘I don’t know the name of my company in Panama’ and then ‘But I’ve only populated it with 92 Euro’ and ‘there’s no bank account’, and now we have a transport minister who is shamelessly lying about buses running on time 95% – when anyone who has every used tallinja knows that is a big fat porkie-pie and it’s 15% of the time at best.

You can’t just pluck a statement from out of the depths of your arse and declare it to be true AND expect people to believe you, can you? My logic screams ‘Hells nah!’, and yet we’re seemingly buying this, we’re debating the validity of these lies. This makes no sense to me at all. We’re not talking about interpretation of facts – we’re talking about tangible realities. Konrad Mizzi and Keith Schembri DO have companies in Panama. They DID open them a couple of months after coming into power. The large amount of money they need to keep these accounts open IS higher than Konrad Mizzi’s income. The power station is still nowhere to be seen. The bus system DOES suck hairy-ass much of the time. These aren’t disputable – they are stone cold facts.

Discussing the parameters and extent of these facts doesn’t make us ‘understanding’, ‘unbiased’, or ‘politically astute’ – it makes us redundant. For example, if the PM declared today that ‘Elephants can Fly’, we wouldn’t take to social media or the newspaper comments boards to discuss the finer points about what exactly the PM means by ‘elephant’ or by the verb ‘fly’ – we’d declare him insane and have done with it. So, for the love of all things green and fragrant, why are we not calling post-truths by their proper term ‘LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND YET MORE LIES’.

If it weren’t so deliciously Orwellian as to literally BE Orwellian, I’d say that we need a actual Ministry of Truth. #MiniTrueFTW