Back around the time of Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign, Nebraska Democrat Senator Bob Kerrey gave Esquire magazine a quote for the ages: “Clinton’s an unusually good liar. Unusually good.”

After all, Bill Clinton wasn’t called “Slick Willie” for nothing.

And while Americans often joke about how to tell when a politician is lying (his lips are moving), there’s a point to be made about the expectations we have for our elected leaders. There’s a time for bending the truth, but when a lie embellishes one’s political résumé or misleads grief-stricken people into thinking that you’ve been in their shoes, that’s a problem.

For that latter point, we need look no further than Joe Biden, who once again trotted out the tall tale of a long-ago kitchen fire to make the deadly Maui firestorm and then the Florida hurricane about him. It’s an oft-repeated anecdote, but part of a pattern where Biden uses the same old falsehoods in a poor attempt to relate to his audience.

Or, to put it less gently, once again Biden lies like a rug. While our Nate Jackson recently pondered whether Biden was incapable of not lying, the Maui incident is also symptomatic of a different issue: whether we’re being told the truth by a partisan media. (By this point, the fact that Joe Biden is a “lying dog-faced pony soldier” is already baked into the cake.) “Members of the liberal mainstream media are finally starting to notice that President Joe Biden is a chronic liar,” as Andrew Stiles at The Washington Free Beacon puts it. “Alas, they are too cowardly — or too afraid of the truth — to use the L-word. Instead, they describe Biden’s lies using an array of watered-down euphemisms.” (We’ll go with door number two, Monty.)

We’re sure our readers will remember that The Washington Post — where it was laughably decreed after Donald Trump took office that “democracy dies in darkness” — kept a running total of the number of “false or misleading claims” Trump ostensibly uttered during his four years in office. Yet its meter seems to be busted when it comes to Biden: Its “fact-checker” (yes, that’s a howler right there) simply believes that “some” of Biden’s stories (read: lies) are “not credible.”

Presumably with a straight face, the aforementioned fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, writes, “As president, Biden has continued a tradition of embellishing his personal tales in ways that cannot be verified or are directly refuted by contemporary accounts.” In other words, we knew all along that Biden was a liar, but it was worth covering up just to get the Bad Orange Man out of office.

Glenn, to salvage whatever shred of dignity still remains, just level with us and admit it.

That’s essentially Mark Hemingway’s take in a recent piece at The Federalist, where he writes: “Time and again, the default assumption for Trump is corrupt motives, where Biden gets the benefit of the doubt to an absurd degree. The idea that it was necessary to call Trump a liar in no way precludes doing the same to Biden who is a world-class liar in his own right. However, if the press were to take the most obvious reading of Biden’s motives, they would have to conclude that the man is a corrupt and brazen liar. They would have to, according to the new rulebook, ‘move closer to being oppositional.’ But that’s not going to happen because political reporters are not a particularly consistent or principled bunch.”

Where Hemingway errs, though, is in not believing mainstream political reporters are consistent and principled. Indeed, they consistently support the power structure of an overarching, bloated federal government because it aligns with their principle of wanting to be with what they consider the winning team and getting the ill-gotten spoils thereof. We the People can’t relate to that because we’re not after the power to rule over everyone’s affairs. We’d simply prefer to enjoy our God-given rights free of Caesar’s interference.

Remember, the media has a reason to consider Donald Trump the Bad Orange Man: He was in the process of upsetting their apple cart. That’s not to say Trump wasn’t a liar; just that overall, his hyperbole accrued to our benefit and not his. If that weren’t a factual statement, you could be sure the media would have found out about and enthusiastically reported on Trump’s own version of “10% for the Big Guy,” but since they have not — even after all the times the media believed “the walls are closing in” on him — one could conclude Trump wasn’t in politics for his personal benefit.

We long ago came to the conclusion that a selfless leader like George Washington would never make it in our current cutthroat political climate. But is it too much to ask to have a leader who we can trust to tell the truth — and a media that fairly reports the facts?