2009: "The Year of the Hoax"

[Little-Acorn]

A year is often marked by an unusual number of incidents that happen in it. 2009 is clearly to be known as "The Year of the Hoax".

* The "Balloon Boy" hoax by a family in Colorado. Turns out the boy was never in the balloon and the family knew it - they just planned it to become famous enough for some kind of reality show.

* An inside whistleblower publishes notes and emails revealing that the niversity of East Anglia's personnell had been systematically distorting and faking data from weather observations, to make people think the climate was changing when it wasn't. Apparently for the purpose of attracting more govenment money to continue their "research", and possibly to get governments to give them even more for "fighting" the climate change they "discovered".

* Senator John Ensign (R-NV), who campaigned on "Family Values", is found to have had an affair with Cynthia Hampton, the wife on one of his aides. Though the affair took place in 2007-2008, it was revealed in 2009.

* Squeaky-clean golfer Tiger Woods was revealed to have had as many as a dozen different mistresses. The various affairs took place over many years, but were publicly revealed in 2009.

* The Obama campaign promised "Hope and Change" before the election. But after Obama's inauguration, the same old politics as usual prevailed throughout the administration, with more backroom deals, broken promises, wild secretive horsetrading, bills conceived and voted on as far as possible from public scrutiny, and astoundig levels from high administration officials of denigration and vilification of anyone who protested or asked for explanations of what was going on.

* In an ongoing hoax spreading over several decades, a diminishing number of advocates still insist that man's actions have something to do with climate change (if there is actually any climate change, see second example above). THis despite more than forty years of such claims having produced no proof whatsoever of any contribution from the actions of humans, to climate change. The hoax continues as unscrupulous "scientists" and their advocates try to coerce governments into giving them more and more money, either to research this supposed "change", or to "fight" it.

* Barack Obama (D-IL) ran for President as a centrist, only to appoint a horde of extreme-left radical advisors and cabinet members, and ram through the biggest spending bills in the nation's history. In the first year of his Presidency, Obama has spent more than every President in U.S. History, combined.

These are just a sample of the myriad hoaxes, falsehoods, and general fakery running rampant in 2009, "The Year of the Hoax".