This story is absolutely true — truly

One of the things coming out in the wake of the election is the realization that some of the news stories being passed around on line were fake.

One example was a story on Facebook that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump. While patently false, the story was adopted as truth by many in the idiocracy and passed around from computer to computer as a real scoop.

Another was that a town in Texas had been quarantined as the result of a terrible disease. Another was that child marriage had been approved in Germany.

According to a story in Huffington Post, which itself may be a fake news story, in the final three months before the election, 20 top-performing (most shared) fake news stories outperformed 20 top-performing factual stories from 19 major media outlets in terms of engagement, according to a BuzzFeed study published last week. (Of course, BuzzFeed studies are not fake.)

You will be relieved to know that The Madera Tribune did not knowingly publish any fake news stories, before, during or after the election ... not even the one about Tribbie the Wonder Dog nearly winning the Senate.

As those of you who pay attention may know, Tribbie was a write-in candidate for the United States Senate from California, to replace Democrat Barbara Boxer who had decided to resign because trotting up and down the stairs in the U.S. Capitol was getting to be more than she cared to do. Tribbie, on the other hand, is a lively pooch that can run up and down flights of stairs all day long. Tribbie would not file as a Democrat, however, because she is a staunch Republican. So she became a write-in candidate.

The rough and tumble California primary, which is too complicated for most folks — even Identity Liberals — to figure out, chose two Democrats, Rep. Loretta Sanchez from Southern California and California Attorney General Kamala Harris, to duke it out. Sanchez won handily, but quickly stepped aside when Harris threatened to have her arrested.

Tribbie finished third because people kept getting her name mixed up with Harris’s. And Tribbie also is a lawyer.

Now, that obviously is not a fake story, but somebody might think it is, and that is why we didn’t use it.

We’ve always got your back — unless, of course, you see this story on Facebook.