[Official] Biden Pinocchio Watch Thread

A Dishonest Afghanistan Accounting
Biden spins a tragedy for U.S. interests into an antiwar victory.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-dish...20-year-war-11630448010?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

 

Associated Press fact check article:

AP FACT CHECK: Biden skirts broken promise on Afghan exit

https://apnews.com/article/ap-fact-check-41a83656d872e2a5d5d79e18fffae6d7

excerpt:

President Joe Biden on Tuesday glossed over his broken promise to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan until the last Americans are out and offered the faint assurance — even with the last U.S. planes gone — that it’s never too late for U.S. citizens to leave.
​

Interesting use of "glossed over" . . . .

 

Tree of Life synagogue disputes Biden’s claim he visited after massacre

https://nypost.com/2021/09/02/tree-of-life-synagogue-disputes-joe-bidens-claim-he-visited/

 

chalk it up to a faulty memory

WH admits Biden’s claim he visited Tree of Life synagogue is not true

https://nypost.com/2021/09/03/white-house-admits-bidens-didnt-tree-of-life-synagogue/

excerpt

Nearly 24 hours after being asked about the discrepancy, a White House official said in a statement that Biden “was referring to a call he had with the Tree of Life rabbi in 2019.”

Biden’s initial false statement received widespread criticism and was featured in segments on CNN and Fox News.

The 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life was the worst anti-Jewish hate crime in US history.

Biden has a reputation for making false or embellished claims and dropped out of his first presidential campaign in 1988 due to a plagiarism scandal. But at nearly 79 years old, his mental acuity also is a frequent matter of public debate.
​

more at the link

 

Inside the Afghan Evacuation: Rogue Flights, Crowded Tents, Hope and Chaos
President Biden has insisted that the evacuation of Kabul was done as efficiently as possible. But key documents obtained by The New York Times suggest otherwise.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/03/us/politics/afghanistan-evacuation.html

excerpt:

White House officials declined to comment on the record for this article.
​

more at the link

 

even the Washington Post is picking up on the righteous drone strike story

https://www.washingtonpost.com/inve...rone-strike-questions/?itid=hp-top-table-high

Examining a ‘righteous’ strike
Expert analysis of deadly U.S. drone strike’s aftermath in
Kabul suggests no evidence of explosives in targeted vehicle

By
Alex Horton
,
Sarah Cahlan
,
Dalton Bennett
,
Joyce Sohyun Lee
,
Meg Kelly
and
Elyse Samuels

Updated Sept. 10 at 7:45 p.m.Originally published Sept. 10, 2021

When a Hellfire missile was launched on Aug. 29 at a target in a Kabul neighborhood — a parked car suspected of containing explosives for use in a suicide attack — U.S. military officials said they were confident the driver and another man at the location had suspected militant ties and were the only people nearby.

The missile took about half a minute to reach the white sedan. In that time, three children approached the car just before it was destroyed, according to a senior U.S. military official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing military investigation. The children were killed, the official said, and families of the victims said another seven people also died in the strike, including the driver and the second man.

U.S. Central Command’s initial description of the drone strike in a statement said that the operation targeted a vehicle linked to the Islamic State-Khorasan and produced “significant secondary explosions” from the vehicle, indicating a “substantial amount of explosive material.”

The Washington Post provided imagery of the damage caused by the strike and U.S. military assessments of the operation to experts, including a physicist and former bomb technicians, and spoke to the nonprofit that employed the driver targeted in the operation. Taken together, their assessments suggest there is no evidence the car contained explosives; two experts said evidence pointed to an ignition of fuel tank vapors as the potential cause of the second blast.

The driver’s employer, a California-based group, said his movements around the city were part of his duties for the nonprofit and said the military may have misinterpreted what he was doing as he moved from place to place and loaded packages into the vehicle.

The experts cautioned that their analysis is reliant on photos and video obtained by The Post, witness accounts and limited information provided by the Pentagon; some experts said it was possible the vehicle contained a small amount of explosives.

Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, defended the operation, calling it a “righteous strike” that foiled a planned attack by the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan just days after a suicide bombing by the group at a Kabul international airport gate had killed 13 U.S. service members and more than 170 Afghans.

“Were there others killed? Yes, there are others killed,” Milley said a few days afterward. “Who they are, we don’t know.”

U.S. Central Command, which is conducting an investigation into the strike, did not provide a response to questions raised by analysts.
​

more at the link

​

 

http://theglitteringeye.com/i-dont-believe-joe-biden-is-lying/

I Don’t Believe Joe Biden Is Lying
Dave Schuler September 13, 2021

or, at least not lying any more than any politician routinely does. Let me define what I mean by “a lie”. A lie is a knowing telling of an untruth with an intention to deceive. Now I can comment on Gerard Baker’s Wall Street Journal remarks:

Now it’s important to say here that the past few years haven’t exactly been a golden age for presidential credibility. Mr. Biden’s predecessor set the bar for authoritative misdirection extremely high.

But you’ll recall that President Trump’s whoppers were, in the somber reporting of the time, cast as an existential threat to the very fabric of American democracy. News articles would report something he’d said as either an outright lie or with the censorious clarification that his words were “false” or “without evidence.” (I earned infamy a few years back as editor of the news pages of this newspaper for insisting that reporting something confidently as a “lie” required a level of knowledge about a person’s mind that we probably didn’t have.)

I don’t see news organizations reporting that President Biden has “falsely” stated that there had been no complaints from U.S. allies, or that he has said “without evidence” that Covid was on the wane. Republicans lie. Democrats merely misspeak.
​

accompanied by a recital of Biden’s “lies”. Note that his criticism is more of media hypocrisy than it is of Biden mendacity. My take is that President Biden has probably been in politics long enough that he can no longer tell what the truth is. That’s an occupational hazard. My take on the media is that most outlets don’t care whether it’s true or false as long as it’s well-intentioned. They can tell whether it’s well-intentioned by the political agenda being advanced.​

 

can prevarications perpetrated in support of the President still be imputed to the President's personal pinocchios compendium? need a ruling

https://nypost.com/2021/09/26/alejandro-mayorkas-7-border-lies/

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/26/opinion/biden-haitian-migrants.html

The Mendacity of Joe Biden
Sept. 26, 2021
By Charles M. Blow
Opinion Columnist

Joe Biden, once again, disappointed many of the same Black voters who were his strongest supporters. How much of this can or should Black people stand?

I always have to start columns like this with an upfront stipulation: Having Biden in the White House is exponentially better than having four more years of Donald Trump, and in a two-party system, you must support one of the two parties’ candidates. Protest abstentions are suicidal. Democrats who at least talk a more racially inclusive game are head and shoulders above Republicans who either court or abide open racists.

It’s not that Biden hasn’t advanced policies that benefit the African American community, efforts that the White House is quick to laud — as it should — when he faces criticism.

With that out of the way, there is still an appraisal of Biden at this point in his presidency — specifically as it relates to Black voters — that isn’t kind.

The latest offense was the administration’s disastrous mishandling of the Haitian migrant crisis at the southern border.

Yes, there were the outrageous images of agents on horseback herding the migrants like cattle, and there was also the administration aggressively deporting the migrants back to Haiti.

When I see those Black bodies at the border, I am unable to separate them from myself, or my family, or my friends. They are us. There is a collective consciousness in blackness, born of the white supremacist erasure of our individuality.

Your accomplishment is never your own, but a credit to the race. Your sins are never your own, but a stain on the race. In America, and throughout the diaspora, all Black people are linked together like a chain of paper dolls.

So it has been incredibly painful to witness the treatment of the Haitians, and it has been impossible not to recoil in disgust or burn with outrage. And to think, “This is happening on Joe Biden’s watch.”

When it was reported that then-President Trump called Haiti a shithole country, Biden responded on Twitter, saying: “It’s not how a president should speak. It’s not how a president should behave. Most of all, it’s not what a president should believe. We’re better than this.”

But deporting these Haitians is worse, not better. The Biden administration and Democrats in general always seem to say the right things on racial issues, but too often their deeds come up short when measured against their talk.

As a justification for many of the deportations, the Biden administration invoked Title 42, which allows deportations based on supposed health risks. The Associated Press pointed out, “The Trump administration invoked it in March 2020 to sweeping effect, prohibiting entry by virtually anyone from Mexico and Canada and essentially sealing the northern and southern borders.” Isn’t that ironic.

What’s more, these particular migrants were being deported to a country many haven’t been to in years. Many of them didn’t leave Haiti in 2021; they left it years ago. And they were being deported into danger. Haiti has recently been devastated by an earthquake, flooding from a hurricane, and the assassination of the president.

The administration’s own special envoy to Haiti resigned Thursday, refusing to be part of the administration’s “inhumane” expulsions regime, citing the fact that Haiti is so dangerous right now that even “American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs to daily life.”

And yet the Biden administration refused to give any indication that it would stop invoking Title 42, The Washington Post reported Friday.

It seems to me that Biden tried to simultaneously eliminate the horrible optics the migrants present — and to do so as quickly as possible — and blunt the already loud criticism from Republicans that he is mishandling immigration and has an open-borders policy. (No wonder, then, that the migrant encampment beneath the Del Rio bridge has already been cleared.)

But those Republicans cannot be appeased. No matter what direction Biden takes they will condemn it. So why not take the moral path, the righteous path, the ethical path?

The Haitian migrant crisis came as negotiations over federal police reform have collapsed and a law guaranteeing federal voting protections is still bogged down in Congress.

At a certain point, words ring hollow, even when they are the right words. At a certain point, success in one area fails to cover deficiencies in another.

The Biden administration’s handling of the Haitians was just wrong. It was also heartbreaking and disgusting.
No White House fact sheet about other policies that benefited Black people can cover that stain. These Black people were treated like animals because Biden was afraid of a Washington full of monsters.

As is too often the case, Black people become the political pawn, a weight around the ankle or a weapon in the hand. Our humanity is reduced to a calculation or a cause. We can be chased down by horseback-riding agents or flown out by weak-kneed presidents.

After Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election, the Rev. Al Sharpton recalled for The Washington Post last week, he said, “‘Black America, you had my back, I’ll have yours.’” Sharpton continued: “Well, we’re being stabbed in the back, Mr. President. We need you to stop the stabbing — from Haiti to Harlem.”

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 27, 2021, Section A, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: The Mendacity Of Joe Biden​

​

 

Joe Biden Would Be a Better President if He Stopped Saying Things That Aren't True
And we would be better citizens if we called him out for it more.

https://reason.com/2021/12/29/joe-b...-if-he-stopped-saying-things-that-arent-true/

an hour ago
Joe Biden Would Be a Better President if He Stopped Saying Things That Aren't True
by Matt Welch

"When I took office," President Joe Biden tweeted Monday, "our economy was on the brink of collapse."

This statement is false. As the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis reported one week after Biden was sworn into office, real Gross Domestic Product in the United States, after increasing by 33.4 percent in the third quarter of 2020, showed a preliminary increase of 4 percent for the last quarter of Donald Trump's presidency. "After a year in which a pandemic and politics posed challenges unlike the U.S. has seen in generations," CNBC reported, "the economy closed 2020 in fairly good shape."

Wall Street hit across-the-board all-time highs on Inauguration Day. Vaccination for COVID-19, seen by many as the critical component to restarting the economy after the first-half recession of 2020, was just then starting to roll out. Analyst forecasts were filled with verbiage like, "we see continued strength in many fundamental leading economic indicators," and "overall, the economic backdrop looks promising."

By fabricating a then-imminent economic calamity, Biden could attempt to claim credit for averting it. Neat! But it's also the kind of political deception you would think that professional journalism, particularly in this age of heightened "moral clarity," would be sensitively attuned to detect and criticize.

Well, you would be wrong. A Google News search on the phrases "Biden," "economy," and "brink of collapse," produces zero mainstream news articles. There was a similar lack of evident interest when the president made another "brink of collapse" claim this May in Ohio.

Behavior that gets rewarded (or even just unpunished) tends to get repeated. And Biden at this stage in his presidency is repeatedly saying things that aren't true.

At his big omicron speech and mini-press conference last week, the president, when asked a question about Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.V.), who had just signaled his opposition to Biden's signature Build Back Better legislation, said, "Joe went on TV today and—I don't know if it was TV or not; I'm told he was speaking to the liberal caucus in the House and said, 'Joe Biden didn't mislead you, I misled you.'"

The White House later had to clarify that, "Senator Manchin did not characterize himself as having been 'misleading.'"

In the same press conference, when asked the very reasonable question of "What took so long to ramp up testing?", the president snapped: "Come on, 'What took so long'?" (That sarcastic rejoinder was edited out of the White House transcript, but the next sentence was not.) "Well, what took so long is—it didn't take long at all. What happened was the Omicron virus spread even more rapidly than anybody thought."

Well, that's not true, either. As the Washington Post's Claire Parker pointed out, "experts had sounded the alarm for more than a year that such a variant could emerge, especially in the vast swaths of the world that remain largely unvaccinated, coming back to bite wealthy countries accused of hoarding doses. Some had repeatedly urged the U.S. government to accelerate the authorization and distribution of rapid tests, pointing to other wealthy nations that have done just that." Indeed, the White House's answer to such questions as recently as early December was mockery.

The president telling two whoppers at a pandemic press conference seems like the type of thing that might attract notice from those journalistic quarters specializing in the intersection between media, politics, and truth. And yet here was the next-day headline at CNN's Reliable Sources: "Biden calls out anti-vax liars for promoting 'dangerous misinformation.' But don't expect anything to change."

As I argued at the end of my pre-election "Case Against Trump" article, "The first rule of pandemic crisis response is that public officials must be sane, sober, and truthful in communicating with the public." Trump has many skills, but that's not one of them. As Jacob Sullum (who wrote the "Case Against Biden" companion piece), has previously observed, "Trump lies routinely, reflexively, and extravagantly, but his supporters do not seem to hold it against him."

Well, supporters of all politicians at all times, including of President Biden at this time, need to develop more exacting standards. It's not OK for a pandemic-era political leader to say, as Biden did just two weeks ago, that if you're vaccinated, you "do not spread the disease to anybody else."

It is not acceptable for a president to claim, as he did Tuesday in a single tweet, that Build Back Better is "fully paid for" (it's not), that it "will not increase the deficit" (it would), and that it "won't raise the taxes by one penny for anyone making less than $400,000 a year" (counters the Tax Policy Center: "roughly 20 percent to 30 percent of middle-income households would pay more in taxes in 2022"). Such hyperbolic balderdash is worthy of a 24-year-old social media intern at a hack think tank; not the Commander in Chief of allegedly the greatest nation on Earth.

Democratic self-governance requires a certain modicum of citizen self-respect. If elected executives can lie with impunity, they will lie with impunity, and the chances of those lies turning out somehow to be "noble" are roughly slim, none, and fat. There's a pandemic still on, a world wracked with its usual uncertainties, and oncoming calamities we cannot currently see. Dishonest federal leadership will only make all those things worse.


​

 

President Biden Repeats False Claim about the Second Amendment
https://jonathanturley.org/2022/05/...peats-false-claim-about-the-second-amendment/