8 hours ago
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If there was such a thing as shame anymore, The Washington Post’s pompous “Fact Checker” column would close up shop.
New revelations in “Original Sin,” a book about Joe Biden’s decline, show how the White House covered up the obvious — and propaganda outlets like the Fact Checker shamed any media that broke ranks.
Take Biden’s wandering off from a group of world leaders at last June’s D-Day celebrations: The New York Post’s front page read “MEANDER IN CHIEF,” which sent Fact Checker writer Glenn Kessler into a fit of apoplexy: “ ‘Cheapfake’ Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead” was his headline.
Kessler gave us “Four Pinocchios” for promoting a “false narrative.”
Yet CNN anchor Jake Tapper, co-author of “Original Sin,” now says this is exactly how the White House’s spin shop worked.
He references another video, when former President Barack Obama helped a shuffling Biden offstage: “When people showed that clip and asked what was going on, [they] said it was a cheap fake,” Tapper says.
“They did this all the time when there was video that seemed to show Biden acting in an odd or unusual, seemingly out of it, way. They would call it a cheap fake. It was not fake. It was actual video.”
Of course, it was only a couple weeks after Kessler’s column that Biden showed the world just how addled he was in the presidential debate, which ultimately led to his withdrawing from the race.
This is hardly the only Fact Check flubbed by the Fact Checker.
In 2021, Kessler said it was a lie that Joe Biden had attended a dinner with his son Hunter and some of Hunter’s business partners.
How did Kessler know? The White House denied it! And it would never lie!
But in March of 2024, Kessler had to update that column to admit, yes, the dinner did happen. The New York Post was right.
The degree to which the Fact Checker bends over backward to tar Republicans and forgive Democrats reached a crescendo in December, with a column titled “Biden’s pardon of Hunter: A flip-flop or a lie?”
No, that’s not The Onion.
Kessler concluded that it was unclear if Biden lied when he said he wouldn’t pardon his son, because “we have not yet seen evidence that Biden made his statements in June knowing he would eventually reverse course.”
This guy makes Bill Clinton look like an amateur.
One more: In February 2024, Fact Checker asked, “Does Biden need a new law to ‘shut down the border’?”
Because President Donald Trump had faced legal challenges for some first-term policies, Kessler concluded that it “suggests a new law might be necessary.”
We now know that was a lie, a full-on Four Pinocchios. Trump immediately reversed Biden’s open border, and crossings have plummeted without a new law. The column has not been updated.
Pesky reality keeps getting in the way of Kessler’s “facts.” How many times does the arbiter of truth need to be wrong before embarrassment sets in?
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