CNN’s hotshot ‘fact-checker’ rides to Biden’s rescue

But, man, of all people to go to bat for on the issue of honesty, it is hard to think of a worse candidate than Biden, who is far from exemplary when it comes to telling the truth.

“Look, there’s just no equivalence,” said CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale, who still may or may not understand what “historically low” means. “Biden makes some false and misleading claims. It’s important to note them. We will. But his assertions of fact have been largely factual. Trump, as we saw at the town hall and see again tonight, has been incessantly and egregiously dishonest.”

Let’s put aside for a moment the absurdity of a supposed fact-checker referring to statements as “largely factual” — is that like “mostly peaceful”? — and focus instead on Biden’s well-established feud with the truth.

The Democratic nominee claimed this week that “all the people would still be alive” had the president acted sooner on the coronavirus pandemic. That is just fantasy. Earlier, on Sept. 9, Biden claimed that COVID-19 has killed 6,114 service members. Not true. On Sept. 2, he said that he was the first person to call for invoking the Defense Production Act. No, he was not. In July, Biden said McDonald’s makes its employees sign noncompete agreements stating they cannot get a job with Burger King. Who even knows where he got that idea? Biden claimed that Trump is the first racist president in U.S. history. Not even close. Biden said in May that every time he has run for office, he has had the backing of the NAACP. Not true. Biden claimed that the Obama administration, in which he served for eight years as vice president, did not “lock people up in cages.” It absolutely did. He claimed that “immediately, the moment [the Iraq War] started, I came out against the war at that moment.” He did not.

These are all examples from just the past couple of months. There is much more where this comes from, including Biden’s plagiarism, his lying about being shot at in Iraq, his insistence that “if you like your healthcare plan … you can keep it,” his bogus claim to have led the charge against Slobodan Milosevic, his lying about being the first in his family to go to university, his nonsense claim that he predicted the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, his fabricated anecdote about being arrested in South Africa for demanding to meet with an imprisoned Nelson Mandela, his false assertion that he “marched in the civil rights movement,” and his false claim that a drunk driver killed his wife and child.

In the late 1980s, when Biden first ran for president, he said during an angry exchange with a voter that he attended law school at Syracuse University on a full academic scholarship, that he finished in the top half of his class in law school, that he was named the outstanding student in the political science department as an undergraduate at the University of Delaware, and that he graduated from Delaware with three undergraduate degrees.

Not a single one of these claims is true.

The point here is not to deflect from Trump’s whoppers. That would probably be impossible anyway. The point is to establish Biden’s record as a liar. To treat the Democratic nominee now as a generally trustworthy character whose falsehoods are even “largely factual” is to ignore his past and to pretend that there is no reason to be on guard. What reason would a fact-checker have to do this?

Does Trump tend to lie more often than Biden? Yes. Do Trump’s lies tend to be more obvious? Yes.

But what sort of fact-checker makes it his business to measure the truthfulness of one campaign against another? What sort of fact-checker makes it his business to downplay objective falsehoods because someone else lies more? What good is a fact-checker once he strays outside of saying simply, “This is true,” and, “That is false,” especially if his subjective determinations benefit a specific political power?

The answer is the sort of “fact-checker” who also makes it his business to repackage certain campaigns’ policies and positions to make them more palatable to the general electorate.

Shot:

Chaser:

Great work, fact-checker.