It’s got to be good to be a Democrat. Once you get over the “always being wrong” part, you can take comfort in the fact that the media will do all it can to cover for your failures. They’ll ignore your problems. Hell, they’ll even lie on your behalf. It has to be nice.
That instinct to protect Democrats is about all that’s keeping Joe Biden’s fading hopes of winning the Democratic Party’s nomination alive.
It’s not that the Democratic Party is in love with the former vice president. They know they have a campaigning disaster on their hands who is unburdened by reality and willing to say anything to get elected but they also know he has the highest name ID and is the most electable in the general election.
The best thing Joe Biden has going for him is he’s affable, a goofy kind of guy people like personally, no matter what craziness comes out of his mouth. The worst thing he has going for him is the seemingly unbreakable string of craziness that comes out of his mouth.
In 2012, I wrote about Biden’s long, storied history of absurdity and lies. “He could say something absurd, such as “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect.” Then he could rattle off a list of academic scholarships he earned, how he didn’t really care his first year of law school but then started to and graduated in the top half of his class, etc. Only it’s all a lie. He eventually has to admit it was all a lie. His scholarship was based on need, not academics, he didn’t graduate in the top half of his class – he was 76th out of 85…”
Given this history, it’s worth noting that he’s not being called a “liar” by anyone in the legacy media.
The Washington Post has made a cottage industry out of “counting Trump’s lies.” The meticulously “fact-check” everything he’s said, compiling them in a database. Journalists and TV personalities cite this list as proof that “Trump is different from other politicians” based on the volume of “lies.”
What constitutes a fact-check worthy lie, according to the Post? When the president said, “The weak illegal immigration policies of the Obama Administration allowed bad MS-13 gangs to form in cities across U.S. We are removing them fast!”
What did the Post write in declaring this “false or misleading”? Their “fact-check” reads, “The MS-13 gang far predates Obama, and has been active since the 1980s. According to the Congressional Research Service in 2005 and 2008, the gang had spread across the country since the 1980s. Moreover, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump has been arresting an increasing number of noncriminals, indicating that it's not just the gang members that are being targeted by his administration.”
Absolutely nothing in what President Trump said is false or misleading. That MS-13 predated Obama is irrelevant to what he said, as is the year they came into being. And “noncriminal” illegal aliens is an oxymoron.
So how did the Post treat Biden when he told an incredibly offensive, stolen valor-by-proxy lie about him awarding a medal to a soldier in an active war zone who didn’t feel he deserved it? They reported, “In the space of three minutes, Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.”
But did they use the word “lie”? Nope. Not in the headline, which said “Biden tells a moving but false war story,” and nowhere in the piece. He was just confused, mixing in pieces of other stories, putting himself at the center of an event he was not involved in.
Whether it was an embellishment, conflating several stories, or flat-out lying doesn’t matter. If Donald Trump had said it, the Post wouldn’t have been able to contain their glee over calling it a lie.
Biden’s history is riddled with these sorts of “exaggerations,” yet somehow the “handsy” guy who sniffs women’s hair and gets a little too friendly with young women is given a pass.
At least the Post reported it, even if they painted Joe in the most favorable light possible. That fact, and not his lack of the grasp of them, should worry Biden the most. No candidate or news outlet wants to be the one to knock him out of the race. Don’t get me wrong, they want him gone, but they don’t want to be the one to do it. People like him. Years of friendly, PR-level press coverage has made an impression on Democratic voters. A campaign death-blow would rebound unfavorably on the person who lands it. So they’re going for the “death by a thousand cuts” approach, hoping he simply implodes.
Of course, the one person recklessly wielding the sharpest knife is Biden. It’s just a question of whether or not the media will honestly report about the deep cuts he regularly inflicts on himself.
Derek is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses.