President Joe Biden earned his first Washington Post “Bottomless Pinocchio” award for repeating a claim the paper had previously debunked, while other recent Biden “gaffes” were also put under fact-checker Glenn Kessler’s microscope Monday.
Kessler wrote that he composed his review of Biden’s “errors of fact” because “readers have asked for fact checks of a variety of recent Biden statements, but none of them seemed big enough for a stand-alone fact check.”
Actually, one of Biden’s recent claims, which he has been making for years, had already merited a full fact check within a month of his inauguration. Specifically, the president said on November 3 that he had spent “more time with [Chinese President] Xi Jinping than any other head of state,” having “traveled 17,000 miles with him.”
In February 2021, however, Kessler had debunked that claim. “There is no evidence Biden traveled that much with Xi … and even if we added up the miles Biden flew to see Xi, it still did not total 17,000 miles,” he penned Monday. “The White House could not offer an explanation for that number either.”
At the time, Kessler awarded the claim Three Pinocchios. But since Biden has repeated it at least 20 times despite its having been publicly debunked, it has been upgraded to a Bottomless Pinocchio, which Kessler describes as “false or misleading statements repeated so often that they [become] a form of propaganda.”
Kessler next examined Biden’s October 27 assertion that “the most common price of gas in America” was “over $5 when I took office.” The administration, Kessler noted, prefers to refer to “the most common price” of gas rather than the “average price” because the former is usually lower. According to the Energy Information Administration, the average gas price was around $2.48 per gallon the week of Biden’s inauguration. Undoubtedly, then, the most common gas price was nowhere near $5 a gallon at that time.
Then there’s Biden’s boast that he is responsible for senior citizens getting the largest increase in their Social Security checks in a decade. Biden, typically, mangled this claim in a November 1 appearance, saying that “for the first time in 10 years, seniors are getting” a Social Security hike, but the administration also tweeted — and then deleted — the claim that the increase occurred “through President Biden’s leadership.”
That’s true, but not in the way the administration intended. Biden’s “leadership” in spending far beyond Uncle Sam’s means, creating debt that the Federal Reserve then bought with newly minted dollars, greatly devalued the currency, generating significant price inflation. (Former President Donald Trump’s coronavirus-relief spending didn’t help, either.) Social Security payments, in turn, are automatically adjusted annually to keep up with inflation. Thus, in bragging that he got seniors a big Social Security hike, Biden was essentially taking credit for skyrocketing prices.
In an October 23 appearance, Biden said, “You are probably aware that I just signed a law” forgiving student-loan debt. “I got it passed by a vote or two,” he added.
“But,” Kessler pointed out, “he never presented such a proposal for Congress to consider.” Instead, his administration simply invented a new interpretation of an existing law to allow the Secretary of Education to forgive student-loan debt.
According to Kessler, “The White House said Biden misspoke and meant to refer to the Inflation Reduction Act”; but, of course, that law “has nothing to do with student loans.” Moreover, “analysts have said that whatever deficit reduction is achieved by the law will be quickly exceeded by the cost of the student loan program, if it survives legal challenges.”
Kessler’s analysis merely scratches the surface of Biden’s misstatements. The president has also been caught recently claiming that the “war in Iraq” is responsible for inflation; that his son Beau died in Iraq, when in fact he died in Maryland; and that he “spoke to” one of the discoverers of insulin, yet the last person connected with the discovery died in 1978, Biden’s fifth year as a senator. Some of these statements were so blatantly false that even the New York Times was obliged to recognize them.
Let’s see how many more Pinocchios, bottomless or otherwise, Biden can rack up before vacating 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
