“Farmer shoots 23-pound grasshopper!”

“Dolphin Grows Human Arms!”

“NASA takes photo of ghosts in space!”

These are some recent tabloid headlines on the shelf at your local supermarket.

Not far from the checkout line is space for the “legitimate” publications like Time magazine. With so much news being slanted to the left these days, many are having a hard time separating the “real” news periodicals like Time from the tabloid fiction about space ghosts and giant grasshoppers.

Time magazine showed its liberal colors with the most recent cover art it photoshopped showing President Donald Trump standing over a crying migrant child. It’s captioned “Welcome to America.”

Designed to hit Trump on his family separation policy, it has only provided new fuel for the president’s Fake News narrative.

The original image of the Honduran migrant child was taken by Getty photographer John Moore but Time digitally added Trump against a red background to dramatize a supposed border separation between the girl and her mother.

In reality, the girl’s father in Honduras says she was never separated from her mother. A border agent said the search for the mother took about two minutes and that he personally asked her how she and her daughter were doing. The girl immediately stopped crying when the mother picked her back up.

Leftist media outlets are doing the Democrats’ bidding by using heart-wrenching photographs of crying children in order to call attention to immigration practices and trying to disgrace the president.

Earlier this month a photograph depicting a sobbing toddler clutching the bars of a cage was widely circulated on social media. This too was concocted.

In reality, the photo was snapped during a protest staged in front of Dallas City Hall to call attention to the Trump administration’s immigration policies. The boy was reportedly crying because he saw his mother outside the mock-up cage and could not figure out how to get to her.

A month ago, another image circulated on social media incorrectly linked the Trump administration to an old photo of detained illegal-immigrant minors being held in a cage during the Obama administration.

Without fact checking, other liberal activists and journalists jumped at the chance to smear Trump, including Shaun King of Black Lives Matter, Linda Sarsour of the Women’s March, and Muslim activist Qasim Rashid.

“I saw this photo floating around and didn’t know if it was real. It is,” King wrote. “Children of immigrants are being held in cages, like dogs, at ICE detention centers, sleeping on the floor. It’s an abomination.”

After learning the information was wrong, those journalists scrambled to delete their social media posts on the Obama-era photo.

The Trump administration is being opposed on two major fronts. Politicians on the political left are opposing him in congress while the liberal media complies by incessantly pounding him, his administration and even his family members.

While the president and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen have taken heat for their enforcement of the immigration law, Democrats like Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi continue to fuel the immigration issue. The hypocrisy from Democrats is obvious.

During their time in the Senate, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama voted in favor of a physical border barrier. And just five years ago, all Senate Democrats, including Schumer and Feinstein, voted in favor of 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Few major media outlets outside of Fox News have reported that many of the children have been used to take drugs across the border or that the administration has employed a “zero tolerance” policy in order to save the lives of these and other children who would otherwise end up in sex slave rings.

This administration has been dealing with slanted reporting and political hypocrisy since Trump took office 18 months ago. The end game for liberal Democrats is to keep the focus on Trump in order to shift congress in this year’s midterm election and defeat him in 2020.

Immigration is a big part of the Democrats’ strategy. Their aim is to keep immigration and racism as hot button issues; oppose any border wall; and push for blanket amnesty for all immigrants who Democratic leaders count on as voters.

By JIM ZBICK | tneditor@tnonline.com