One of my heroes in journalism, the late 20th Century muckraker I.F. Stone, is most famous for his dictum that all governments lie. Sadly, that's been true -- albeit in wildly varying degrees -- with all the U.S. presidents of my lifetime. The list includes Republicans like George W. Bush (the Iraq war, the African uranium caper) and Richard Nixon (pretty much everything) and Democrats like LBJ (Vietnam) and, yes, even the relatively scandal-free Barack Obama ("If you like your health insurance, you can keep it," even after evidence emerged to the contrary, and his promise of "the most transparent government"...not even close.) But none dared to launch what a certain German minister of propaganda (today you might call him a "chief strategist") once called The Big Lie -- a falsehood so outrageous and so without basis that it's almost futile to contradict in any conventional way.

But Donald Trump went there. Armed with his iPhone and his two thumbs, the president-elect -- who takes the oath of office in 54 days -- experienced a Twitter meltdown earlier this afternoon, and ultimately told a shocking Big Lie to the nation he plans to lead.