It’s been a bad couple of weeks for the liberals’ narrative outlook on life. One after another of their favorite genres has blown up in their faces as they have been caught telling and promoting stories that were too good to be true.

There was the gender-based theme, as the Rolling Stone tale of the horrendous gang rape at the University of Virginia went the way of the Duke lacrosse story — an elaborate hoax put on by the self-styled victim with no connection whatever to fact. A feminist student complained that “to let fact-checking define the narrative” would be a “mistake.” But a narrative without facts is simply a fiction and a lie that does damage to innocent people.