Biden bust
2023-08-31 19:00:45 UTC
Biden is the biggest liar in POTUS history.
If The Media Insisted On Calling Trump A Liar, That Standard Must BeApplied To Bidens Corruption Lies
One of the distinguishing features of Trumps presidency was an aggressive
press corps that felt obligated to call out Trumps lies so why wont
they apply this same standard to Biden who is inarguably a world-class
liar?
In August of 2016, The New York Times did something rather unprecedented
the paper ran a front-page editorial by columnist Jim Rutenberg that
stopped just short of openly saying the media should openly oppose Donald
Trump, regardless of journalistic ethics.
According to Rutenberg, journalists who believed Trump was racist and
nationalist would have to throw out the textbook American journalism has
been using for the better part of the past half-century. You would move
closer than youve ever been to being oppositional.
Now, Rutenberg was greatly flattering himself and his journalistic peers
by pretending that any vestigial attempts at objectivity in the American
media were anything more than farce, and all but the most blinkered
Americans knew it. Still, the shift in tone during the Trump years was
palpable. Perhaps the most visible sign was the medias eagerness to call
Trump a liar and to specifically call out his supposed lies, even to his
face in real-time if necessary. The resulting coverage was something to
behold. A Washington Post media column from 2019 took a rhetorical victory
lap and rounded up just a few of the then-recent headlines about Trumps
presidency:
? CNN: The Mueller report: A catalog of 77 Trump team lies and
falsehoods.
? Minneapolis Star Tribune: President Trump lies to troops about pay
raise.
? Financial Times: The real reason Donald Trump lies.
? Los Angeles Times: Mueller report exposes all the presidents liars.
? Chicago Tribune: Why are Trumps lies not ruinous to him? Because truth
can be in the eye of the beholder.
? The New Yorker: Its True: Trump Is Lying More, and Hes Doing It on
Purpose.
? Foreign Policy: Does It Matter That Trump Is a Liar?
Now, I dont want to even go down the road of relitigating the veracity of
various Trump statements. This has been debated and cataloged endlessly;
Trump has lied. But I will say that theres good reason why you dont
throw around the word liar with such abandon. Thats because ascertaining
what constitutes a lie often depends on determining motive or
circumstantial assessments that often reveal as much or more about the
biases of the person making the accusation.
And the media was often so hysterical they didnt just throw out the
journalism rulebook when it came to fairly evaluating Trump Pulitzer
Prizes for completely discredited Russia collusion accusations are pretty
solid evidence of their inability to do that they threw out the logical
one as well. The Washington Post would eventually claim that Trump had
uttered 20,000 false or misleading statements, or nearly 14 a day for
his entire presidency, an absurd claim that, whatever number of lies Trump
did tell, was discrediting to the Post when subjected to the slightest
scrutiny. Theres a strong case to be made that this approach to Trump
ended up helping him. When everythings a lie, nothing is.
Which brings us to Joe Biden. Its hard to think of a more categorical
denial than the one Biden issued in August 2019 about his role in his
sons business dealings. First of all, I have never discussed with my
son, or my brother, or anyone else, anything having to do with their
businesses, period. What I will do is the same thing we did in our
administration. There will be an absolute wall between the personal and
private, and the government, said Biden. There wasnt any hint of
scandal at all when we were there. And I will impose the same kind of
strict, strict rules. That is why I have never talked with my son or my
brother, or anyone else in the distant family about their business
interests, period. The House Oversight Committee has compiled another 15
more explicit denials from Biden during his campaign, and as recently as
last year, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was issuing more blanket
denials on his behalf.
This was never remotely believable, but now the evidence is overwhelming.
The National Archives recently released 5,400 emails from his time as vice
president, where he was using pseudonyms to, among other things,
communicate with his son, Hunter Biden, about his questionable foreign
business dealings. Devon Archer, Hunters business partner, has talked
extensively and publicly about Joe Biden being involved in his sons
lucrative dealings with corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs and business deals
tied to Chinas repressive communist government. (Hes the second business
partner to go public and say this after Tony Bobulinski was largely
ignored in the run-up to the 2020 election.) Victor Shokin, the Ukrainian
prosecutor Joe Biden got fired while Shokin was investigating the
Ukrainian gas company that was paying Bidens son a million dollars a
year, has recently come forward with more damning details about what was
going on.
Even the Democrat hacks in Congress, such as Dan Goldman whom corporate
media called out for misrepresenting what Archer said about Biden, now
concede that Joe was playing along with his son to only sell the illusion
of access rather than a blatant quid pro quo. Which even if that self-
serving justification were true, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act clearly
singles out payments to an officials family members as the basis for
corruption, and lots of other bribery statutes on the books would cover
this arrangement. Which, again, everyone now admits Joe Biden had full
knowledge of and participated in to a large degree.
On the question of motives and quid pro quo, the media hypocrisy is
absolutely astounding. In his recent interview with Fox News, Shokin asked
a pretty salient question: The fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion
in U.S. money in exchange for my dismissal, my firing, isnt that alone a
case of corruption?
No, its not. U.S. foreign aid is often conditioned on countries taking
official actions that the U.S. government regards as important. Thats
especially the case, as it was in Ukraine, with rooting out corruption,
the Washington Posts Aaron Blake retorted in a column earlier this week.
Indeed, this was precisely the defense that then-acting Trump White House
Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney offered back in 2019 regarding Trumps having
sought to use foreign aid for leverage with Ukraine.
Howd that defense work out for the Trump White House? I seem to recall
that the Democrats didnt buy that claim, proceeded to allege quid pro quo
was occurring, and impeached Trump over it. All while much of the media
establishment was cheerleading.
But consider for a moment the irony that, whether or not the issue of
foreign aid to Ukraine was being used as leverage, Trump was asking about
an investigation into Biden family corruption in Ukraine that now appears
wholly merited. How do we reconcile that? Its all a matter of
disingenuous relativism.
Mulvaney was right, says Blake. But the issue with Trump was whether he
was leveraging Ukraine for personal gain and there was more evidence
that this was true of him than of Biden. Trump wanted Ukraine to announce
it was investigating Hunter Biden at a time when Joe Biden was Trumps
likeliest 2020 election opponent.
First off, this isnt a contest here if Trump was seeking to exploit a
corruption investigation to help him politically, that was enabled by the
fact that Joe Biden and his son were indeed corrupt. They were able to
paint Trumps suggestive words on the call as outrageous in large part
because everyone was still committed to this notion that Biden was kept
apart from his sons shady business dealings. While that was always
dubious, the charade is quite definitively over.
Regardless, what on earth does Blake mean when he says there was more
evidence that this was true of him than of Biden? Since nothing ever came
to fruition, whatever nefarious things it is assumed Trump was trying to
put in motion on that phone call are premised on a heavy amount of
assumption and interpretation. With Biden, we now have emails, bank
transfers, photos of the vice president apparently dining with Hunters
foreign partners, and credible testimony from those in the know, all
pointing to the fact he was enabling and an active participant in his
sons corrupt deals.
Time and again, the default assumption for Trump is corrupt motives, where
Biden gets the benefit of the doubt to an absurd degree. The idea that it
was necessary to call Trump a liar in no way precludes doing the same to
Biden who is a world-class liar in his own right. However, if the press
were to take the most obvious reading of Bidens motives, they would have
to conclude that the man is a corrupt and brazen liar. They would have to,
according to the new rulebook, move closer to being oppositional. But
thats not going to happen because political reporters are not a
particularly consistent or principled bunch.
Of course, the problem with Bidens lying goes well beyond the issues of
foreign corruption; the issue of character and personal flaws was one that
was frequently hung around Trumps neck. Again, I fail to see how Biden
faces a different standard. His issues with lying might be the worst of
any politician of the modern era. He was caught extensively plagiarizing
in law school, and he probably never should have been given a degree, but
if you ask Biden, he went to law school on a full academic scholarship,
he ended up in the top half of his law school class, and graduated with
three degrees from undergraduate school. None of that is true. His first
presidential campaign was derailed when he plagiarized a speech from a
British politician, and it made him a national laughingstock.
Hes blatantly lied about so many things its difficult to keep track, but
its not just the quantity its the abhorrent specifics of some of these
lies. After he lost his wife and young daughter in a tragic car wreck, he
went around saying that the guy driving the truck that hit them drank his
lunch. Not only was the guy sober, but he did everything he could to
administer aid at the scene and was haunted by the accident for the rest
of his life. And according to those familiar with the 50-year-old crash,
Bidens wife was at fault. And those arent the only family deaths hes
exploiting; he also keeps saying his son Beau died in Iraq as if it were
some sort of combat death when he died in Maryland from a brain tumor.
Hes repeatedly claiming he was involved in the civil rights movement when
he was not and earlier this week, he made the absurd claim he
literally, not figuratively talked former South Carolina Sen. Strom
Thurmond into voting for the Civil Rights Act. Biden didnt get elected to
the Senate until eight years after the Civil Rights Act passed, and in any
event, Thurmond voted against it. But its one thing to want to claim to
be part of something as noble as the civil rights movement its quite
another to lie about getting an award from George Wallace and travel to
Alabama and say, We (Delawareans) were on the Souths side in the Civil
War.
Weve barely scratched the surface of the lies here. So how exactly do the
media cover an inveterate pathological liar who will say anything to
anyone including exploiting the tragic deaths of his wife, 13-month-old
child, and son, as well as pandering to perceived racists that he thinks
will further his political career?
Biden, Storyteller in Chief, Spins Yarns That Often Unravel was the
headline in The New York Times last fall. While one might be tempted to
offer a crumb of credit for broaching the topic at all, the whole article
belongs in some kind of pantheon for euphemisms and damage control:
President Biden has embraced storytelling as a way of connecting with his
audience, but his folksiness can veer into a personal folklore.
The selective experts quoted in the article dont much help matters. He
obviously has this tendency, where hes a good and decent man who in
politics has felt like he could stretch the truth up to a point just like
virtually every president has done, Eric Alterman, author of Lying in
State: Why Presidents Lie and Why Trump Is Worse and a professor at
CUNY, told the Times. With Biden, people have decided these are not the
kind of lies that matter. These are the kinds of lies that peoples
grandfathers tell. It would have been nice if the Times clarified that
Alterman was a longtime columnist for lefty magazines such as Mother Jones
and The Nation and not some dispassionate academic. Regardless, Bidens
damnable lies are far worse than grampy whiling away time on the porch
spinning the yarns that make up the colorful tapestry of his personal
folklore. And they date back decades, long before age and senility were
ever excuses.
Ultimately, its hard to tell whether voters have decided Bidens lies
dont matter when so many people are working to obscure them. But heading
into 2024, it does provide a simple litmus test for who to take seriously.
Shouting What about Trump? is not an acceptable way to avoid
acknowledging the obvious extent of Bidens corruption and his rank
dishonesty about it. And anyone who is unwilling to plainly state that
Bidens a particularly troubling liar is someone who is putting politics
over facts, and they cannot be trusted.
https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/31/if-the-media-insisted-on-calling-
trump-a-liar-that-standard-must-be-applied-to-bidens-corruption-lies/