Bill Clinton Proposes Internet Rumor Control Agency, Universe Shudders from Irony Overload

Bill Clinton doesn’t like all the misinformation and rumors floating on the Internet. And he thinks the United Nations or the U.S. government should create an agency to do something about it.

“It would be a legitimate thing to do,” Clinton said in an interview airing Friday on CNBC.

Yes, folks, that Bill Clinton — you know, the one who committed serial sexual harassment and perjury and managed, thanks to a crack rumor and misinformation team led by Lanny Davis, to come out of it as the victim — wants a government agency to create a World Department of Internet Fact-Checking.

Oh, but it gets better. So much better. Take a gander at which completely accurate, not even slightly biased organizations he wants to use as models.

“Let’s say the U.S. did it, it would have to be an independent federal agency that no president could countermand or anything else because people wouldn’t think you were just censoring the news and giving a different falsehood out,” Clinton said.

“That is, it would be like, I don’t know, National Public Radio or BBC or something like that, except it would have to be really independent and they would not express opinions, and their mandate would be narrowly confined to identifying relevant factual errors” he said. “And also, they would also have to have citations so that they could be checked in case they made a mistake.”

So, it would be like NPR or the BBC except that it wouldn’t be like either of them in any way we’d recognize. Oh, sure, the government would run this new Office of Internet Honesty and Rumor Squishing, but it would do so honestly and on the up and up just like it runs all those other non-partisan, transparently-operated agencies with which we’ve entrusted it. Perhaps Clinton had the completely objective PolitiFact in mind when he conjured up his Ministry of Truth.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter what Bill Clinton had in mind. His solution is, of course, the bog-standard progressive solution to every problem: a new government program. It likely has never occurred to him that the solution to bad speech is more speech, or if it had, the thought was immediately bludgeoned to death because there’s no way such a radical idea could live long in the mind of someone so steeped in left-wing cant.

We Americans are far from perfect, but we are generally smart enough to sift good information from bad. There will always be a portion of us who believe in flying saucers, Bigfoot, or Keynesian Economics, but that’s the price we pay for a free society. I’d much rather have my friends and neighbors work out the great issues of the day on the internet than have the “truth” filtered through a room full of government-selected fact-checkers. In the end, my friends and neighbors will get the right answer more than Bill Clinton’s Caretakers of Truth.