When Biden Collapses, Its ‘Fact-Checkers’ to the Rescue
Whether it’s focusing on misinterpreting Trump’s hyperbole or omitting Biden’s lies, his defenders jumped in.
Last night’s debate was a doozy. Our Douglas Andrews did a fantastic job of hitting the highlights and the big picture, so I won’t duplicate his efforts. I also am not going to fact-check Joe Biden’s every lie. In one sense, suffice it to say, He lies. A lot.
But I am going to take on one of my favorite targets: Leftmedia “fact-checkers.”
The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler is one of the most faithful of the left-wing Praetorian Guard, always ready to blister Donald Trump in service to the Democrats’ agenda. In doing so, he routinely devolves into opinion-checking and deliberate misunderstanding of Trump’s points. Such was the case yet again as he made a frenzied effort to hit Trump’s “dozens of false claims” while rebutting only “a few” of Biden’s.
The biggest part of the “fact-check,” however, is what Kessler didn’t even bother to counter.
Kessler omitted numerous Biden whoppers: For example, his false claim to have been endorsed by the Border Patrol, his bogus assertions about the deficit, his lament that Trump left him “15% unemployment,” his incredible statement that he “doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world,” and the lie that formed the basis of his campaign — that Trump said the Charlottesville Nazis were “very fine people.” Biden even added that Trump “says Hitler’s done some good things.”
Charlottesville is easily explained. Kessler “fact-checked” that episode three years after it happened, and he awarded Trump four Pinocchios despite the fact that Trump did NOT say what Biden and others said he said.
As Trump referenced last night, however, even Snopes finally got around to fact-checking that last week. Biden’s 2020 campaign rationale was based on a BIG lie, and Kessler let him get away with it. The same goes for the Hitler comment, which Kessler didn’t address at all.
As for the Border Patrol, that was put to rest last night not by Kessler but by the Border Patrol itself. “To be clear,” read the post on the Border Patrol Union’s X account, “we never have and never will endorse Biden.”
Yeah, that’s pretty clear.
What’s also clear is that 13 Americans died because of Biden’s disastrous surrender and retreat in Afghanistan. The fact that Biden himself brought up that subject was as stunning as his lie about troops not dying.
Kessler not only didn’t fact-check him on it but instead went after Trump for his claims about the plans to exit Afghanistan. Unreal.
In another case — the supposed “suckers and losers” comment — Kessler helped Biden pile on with lies. Rather than explain that Trump was correct about the story being debunked, Kessler would only say, “There’s no way to definitively confirm the story.”
Other folks are aptly fact-checking Biden — here, here, here, and here for starters — so I’ll leave it there.
My point is really about the Leftmedia fact-checkers being as bad as the lying Biden himself.
A final note, though, is that while Trump did parry a lot of the attacks from his opponent, he has a bad habit of so vastly overstating his case that he flings open the barn door for bad actors like Kessler to take him so literally as to miss the point entirely. Low-information voters only end up knowing that an army of “fact-checkers” has branded Trump a “liar.”
Trump was typically undisciplined last night. It wasn’t a rally, it was a debate, and as bad as Biden performed — and it was bad — Trump didn’t deliver very many home runs. He had numerous opportunities to deliver exceptional rebuttals, but he often failed to do so. That’s unfortunate enough on its own, but when Democrats figure out how to replace Biden, Trump will no longer have the advantage of facing a dementia patient who Jill Biden wheeled in from the White House nursing home.
