By nearly every measure, from the economy to foreign policy, the Biden presidency has been a failure.
In 2020, when Joe Biden campaigned for the White House, he vowed to “shut down” the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly half a million Americans have died of the virus since Biden assumed office in January 2021, many of them during the omicron outbreak.
In 2020, Biden promised to “restore the soul of our nation.” Since then, he has attacked the U.S. Supreme Court directly while on foreign soil, calling the court the single most “destabilizing” force in the world. Since 2020, he has falsely blamed private businesses for high gas prices, seeking desperately to absolve his administration of any responsibility for rising inflation. He has also accused opponents of the Democratic Party’s overreaching “voting rights” agenda of being on the side of George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Jefferson Davis.
And this is to say nothing of the deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan, the humanitarian crisis on the U.S. southern border, and the utter disaster that is Vice President Kamala Harris.
Remember, though, it is you who are wrong to notice Biden’s many failures, according to the president’s most sycophantic cheerleaders in the press.
Give the man a break! Being president is hard. They don’t teach this in school!
“Give Biden a break,” the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank pleaded in a July 6 opinion article.
Then, of course, there’s the Atlantic’s resident “expert” Tom Nichols, who penned an article in January titled “Leave Joe Biden alone.”
Sensing a theme yet?
In 2021, New York magazine published an article titled simply “Give Biden a break.”
The New Republic that same year published an article similarly titled “Give Joe Biden a break.”
And so on.
Won’t someone please think of our dear, fragile president? Be gentle. It’s his first time.
A tardy retraction
The left-wing blog Salon corrected an article last week that falsely accused Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis of signing a bill requiring professors and students to register their political beliefs with the state.
Worse than the original falsehood is the fact that the Salon article was published in 2021, meaning, yes, it took a full year for the publication to issue a correction, long after the “report” was fact-checked and shown to be very much incorrect.
“DeSantis signs bill requiring Florida students, professors to register political views with state,” read the original June 23, 2021, headline. Its subhead added, “Universities may lose funding if staff and students’ beliefs do not satisfy Florida’s GOP-run legislature.”
This is just not true, as multiple media fact-checkers showed at the time.
PolitiFact rated the article as “false,” explaining the new law “doesn’t require university students, faculty and staff to register political views.”
Rather, the fact-check continued, the survey “will be voluntary and won’t ask about individuals’ political beliefs. Instead, it will ask whether individuals ‘feel they can express their political viewpoints and opinions in their college classrooms.’”
This was in 2021.
Then, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the Salon article went viral last week on social media, earning mentions and pickup from a diverse set of left-wing politicos and celebrities. The cooler and more intelligent among us took the opportunity to remind everyone (again) that the article is not, in fact, an accurate reflection of reality.
In yet another twist that doesn’t quite make sense, Salon decided for some reason last week to address the inaccuracies in its article, more than a full year after the “report” was fact-checked as “false.”
The new headline reads [emphases added], “DeSantis signs bill requiring survey of Florida students, professors on their political views.”
A weasely, small-font editor’s note also appears in the amended version of the article. It reads, “The headline for this article has been revised since its original publication to more accurately reflect the language of the bill in question.”
Better late than never. Just kidding. This stinks all around. No points awarded.
Panic
The New York Times is sounding the alarm over the Republican Party’s recent gains with Hispanics. This specific demographic was supposed to be a lock for Democrats, but things aren’t exactly going their way. In fact, a Latina Republican just flipped a Democratic-held seat in a (usually) reliably blue district in the (usually) reliably liberal Rio Grande area in Texas. The district’s new representative is Mayra Flores, the first Mexican-born woman to be sworn into Congress.
The New York Times is panicked.
“The Rise of the Far-Right Latina,” reads the July 6 headline. Its subhead reads, “Representative Mayra Flores is one of three Republican Latinas vying to transform South Texas politics by shunning moderates and often embracing the extreme.”
The report adds, “The Trump age has given rise to a new brand of Texas Republicans, one of whom is already walking the halls of Congress: the far-right Latina.”
Be scared. Are you scared? Why aren’t you scared? “Far-right” Latinas walk among us!
As evidence of Flores’s alleged “extremism,” the New York Times cites her mainstream conservative positions, including her support for stricter immigration controls and her opposition to abortion.
The paper also cites as examples of Flores’s “extremism” her support of former President Donald Trump, her refusal to say plainly whether Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, and her past tweets of “QAnon hashtags.” As for the QAnon stuff, Flores said this year in an interview the tweets were in opposition to the conspiracy theory, adding she has never supported “this nonsense.”
Flores also retweeted an account that alleged the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was an inside job by Antifa. This is indeed pretty far out there, but this is hardly the point. The point is the New York Times’s curiously lopsided coverage of “extremism” in Congress. Recall that it was not similarly panicked when an avowed Democratic socialist Latina won a Democratic primary in New York in 2019.
Remember that?
When Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is absolutely an extremist — especially when it comes to abortion (she wants no restrictions whatsoever, at any stage of development) and the First and Second Amendments (she wants both to be severely curtailed) — won her primary, the New York Times sounded no alarms. It issued no dire warnings regarding her “extremism,” of which she is extremely proud.
Rather, this is the sort of headline we got at the time: “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Emerges as a Political Star.”
Ocasio-Cortez, who last month called for the Supreme Court to be packed or destroyed altogether, is now in her second term as a congresswoman.
All extremism is bad. But some extremism is better than others.
Becket Adams is the program director of the National Journalism Center.
