Do you follow satirist Stephen Colbert on Twitter? If you don’t already, you might want to start – he’s tweeting dozens of “facts” about Senator Jon Kyl… which are all lies. But that’s ok, because they’re “#NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement”.

To understand Colbert’s hilarious batch of Kyl “fact” tweets, you’ll have to go back to his Tuesday night broadcast (a relevant clip of which you can watch here). During the show, he made a mockery of Kyl’s recent statement on the senate floor that Planned Parenthood’s operations consisted of 90% abortions – when in reality the number is closer to 3%. Kyl’s PR team backtracked the following day, saying that Kyl’s statement was not meant to be taken as fact.

And queue Colbert.

Colbert let everyone in his audience know that Kyl had all of his fingers surgically removed and replaced with bratwurst… but that they shouldn’t take that as a factual statement. Nor should they consider Colbert to be tweeting factually in the dozens of tweets he has posted since about Senator Kyl, all tagged with #notintendedtobeafactualstatement just to be clear.

His campaign to show just how ludicrous it is to say something and claim that it wasn’t intended to be a fact is still going strong on Twitter. He’s tweeting from @StephenAtHome round the clock, gems like:

Citing religious reasons, Jon Kyl refuses to utter the number 8. #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement

Once a year, Jon Kyl retreats to the Arizona Desert and deposits 2 million egg sacs under the sand. #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement

Jon Kyl was sent from the future to kill Sarah Conner. #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement

Jon Kyl thinks no one can see him when he puts a paper bag on his head. #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement

And Colbert has enlisted the help of his 2 million strong followers to join in.

According to trendistic, #NotIndendedToBeAFactualStatement was 0.13% of all tweets on Wednesday at 12AM Eastern, which means about 18,571,428 tweets and retweets containing that hashtag were sent out that hour alone.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia