There could be no clearer foreshadowing of the coming campaign to ease Joe Biden out of office than the strange new disrespect shown by CNN’s “fact checker”. For the first time ever, the President’s statements are being evaluated as if he were a Republican.
“Fact check: Biden’s midterms message includes false and misleading claims” embraces nine items. Some are the sort that any semi-honest fact checker would have to rate as false: Gasoline prices weren’t over five dollars a gallon when Biden took office. He didn’t get Congress to pass his student loan giveaway “by a vote or two” or by any other margin. The tax cuts enacted in 2017 didn’t benefit “only the top one percent of the American public”. The Biden spending splurge hasn’t reduced the federal debt.
The interesting fact checks are those of the kind ordinarily reserved only for the GOP, namely, those that attach “false” labels to allegedly false conclusions based on undeniably true statements and to trivial factual muddles. For example, it is true that the 2023 increase in Social Security payments will be the largest in many years. (The fact-checked statement says ten; the actual number is forty-two. The President was unwontedly modest.) That Biden presents the increase as an accomplishment of his Administration is a dubious interpretation, but the conclusions to be drawn from facts are outside the fact checker’s bailiwick.
On the trivial side is Biden’s claim that he has traveled “17,000 miles” with Communist dictator Xi Jinping. That’s an obvious muddle – untrue but insignificant.
Combining both facets of bad fact checking is the response to “Unemployment is down from 6.5 to 3.5%, the lowest in 50 years.” CNN sniffs that 3.5 percent unemployment is only tied for the lowest in half a century, then points out that the other months with that low a figure were during the Trump Administration, before the panicdemic struck. Once again, the error is trivial, and the “fact check” – assigning significance to it because “Biden uses these campaign speeches to favorably compare his own record to Trump’s record” – is argumentation rather than blue penciling.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, I think that CNN outargues Biden at every point. But a month ago, it wouldn’t have argued with him at all. Soon, I imagine, it will begin highlighting the spoors of his diminishing mental capacity. And then the guy whom Art Buchwald called “the Great Mentioner” will begin speculating about primary challenges, voluntary retirement, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, perhaps even Impeachment. The Left’s Overton Window is opening. Joe soon will feel the breeze.
Update (November 7, 2022): CNN isn’t alone. This morning, the Washington Post’s fact checker awards President Biden “a Bottomless Pinocchio”, which sounds like a description of a Meta avatar. (If you don’t want to pay for access, you can read a summary here.)
I begin to wonder whether Slow Joe will make it all the way to 2023.
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