Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), the Republican nominee for vice president, publicly repeated and encouraged the spread of this story. Eventually, former President Donald Trump repeated a version of it during his presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Within days, the storyline deflated. Nobody provided compelling evidence to support the story. The cat that had disappeared, triggering the rumor, returned home uneaten.

Vance and Trump were roundly attacked for peddling the rumor. “It induces panic and fear and depletes resources,” Bryan Heck, Springfield city manager, told news media. “We’re living the danger that misinformation and created stories leads to.”

Vance explained himself to CNN’s Dana Bash when she pressed him on the subject: “The hospitals are overwhelmed, Dana. The schools are overwhelmed. The local services are completely overwhelmed,” he said. All of those claims were well established.

“I have been trying to talk about the problems in Springfield for months, and the American media ignored it… The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes…”

Where did Vance get the notion that it was okay to spout dubious, even false, claims to draw attention to his preferred issue?

He most probably got it from Barack Obama and Joe Biden, or maybe from Harris. All of them do the same and have found that it works.

Obama and Harris both created stories on which to focus their campaigns for a while.

The Democrats created stories that were factually false — verifiable malarkey. They were given a pass by the news media for their falsehoods because these stories seemed to reflect a deeper truth.

Call it factually false but directionally true.

Obama’s 2012 campaign had a main line of assault on each member of the GOP ticket: Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. Both of them were based on lies.

“Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” was the main line Obama surrogates used to attack Romney. It was the headline that New York Times editors had placed on Romney’s 2008 op-ed arguing for a managed restructuring of the major automakers, who had just become the latest casualties of the financial crisis.

Obama and his party mates convinced the public that Romney had called for letting the Big Three go out of business. That was the clear, unmistakable message from Democrats in September 2012, and it was their main attack on Romney.

Jennifer Granholm, the governor of Michigan at the time, made the attack this way: Obama, she said, “organized a rescue! He made the tough calls! And he saved the American auto industry! And you know, you know… Mitt Romney saw the same crisis and you know what he said: ‘Let Detroit go bankrupt.'”  

If you think that’s a fair attack, go back and read Romney’s op-ed and then study what Obama’s “rescue” entailed. The plans, in all the essentials, were the same. Obama led the Big Three through a structured bankruptcy in order to preserve them as going concerns, propping them up with government loans — which was what Romney prescribed in his op-ed.

It was a lie to claim Romney wanted the Big Three to die while Obama heroically saved them. And this lie was, again, the central attack on Romney.

When Joe Biden used this dishonest line of attack, the Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler checked in and gave Biden the thumbs up. When Obama brought up in a debate the following month, Kessler had a more nuanced endorsement of Obama’s attack: “Ultimately, along with getting nearly $80 billion in loans and other assistance from the Bush and Obama administrations, GM and Chrysler did go through a managed bankruptcy. But many independent analysts have concluded that taking the approach recommended by Romney would not have worked in 2008.”

Got that?

Romney’s proposal to “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” was — on the bankruptcy score, the relevant score — the same as Obama’s; but it’s okay for Obama to mislead the public about Romney’s plan because Kessler’s preferred unnamed and unlinked policy analysts say Romney’s plan wasn’t very good on the details.

In essence, the media defense was: Sure, Obama was misleading the public, but the main thrust — that Romney’s plan was bad — is true.

It was the same with Obama’s attacks on Ryan. The Democrats blasted Ryan for introducing a bill that would, in Democrats’ words, “redefine rape.”

Ryan’s offense was supporting a bill that had the phrase “forcible rape” in it. This was, Democrats claimed, an effort to “redefine rape.” Literally, the only grounds for this charge was including the adjective “forcible.”

But “forcible rape” had shown up in state and criminal codes for decades, a distinction with statutory rape. Democrats’ hate-crime laws in the 1990s distinguished implicitly between “forcible rapes” and other rapes.

When I pointed this out at the time, liberal journalists rejected the comparison, because the Democrats’ laws were about expanding hate crimes, and the Republicans bill was about limiting federal funding for abortion.

That is, it was fine to claim falsely that Republicans were “redefining rape” because Republicans really were doing bad things that could, in the opinion of reporters, hurt women.

This year, Harris is playing the same dishonest game with abortion. After Roe v. Wade was overturned, the left-wing ProPublica searched the country for a case of an abortion ban killing a pregnant mother. What they settled on was a case of an abortion pill killing a woman (and her in-utero twins).

ProPublica’s opinion piece rested on a flatly false claim that Georgia’s abortion law outlawed the lifesaving procedure that Amber Thurman needed after her chemical abortion.

Nevertheless, the Harris campaign and the whole Democratic Party made Thurman’s death and ProPublica’s false account of it central to this year’s election.

Reporters are supposed to care about facts, but there are almost no mainstream fact-checks on ProPublica’s false claim about Georgia’s law or the Harris campaign’s repetition of it.

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Why? Because they believe that, in general, women probably are dying thanks to abortion bans. More generally, they think abortion bans are attacks on women. So, splitting hairs on this one case distracts from what they believe is the “larger truth.”

This brings us back to Vance’s use of stories about cats.