Our Liar in Chief

Leftists absolutely love to call President Trump a liar, perhaps even more so than they enjoy calling him a racist. Numerous Leftist pundits and media outlets put a lot of time and effort into compiling lists of “Trump lies” throughout his presidency. The most prolific lie-collector (and, thus, the most-often source cited by the Left) was the Jeff Bezos-run Washington Post, which collected – get this – over 30,000 Trump lies in only four years!

Leftists like to confuse statements of fact with lies when the facts contradict their beliefs. They also like to claim that statements made by people who believe what they are saying to be true, which turn out to be untrue, are “lies.” They confuse subjective opinions with lies as well. They also like to claim that any slight statistical inaccuracy or hyperbole or exaggeration for effect is a “lie.” Note, however, that they only consider these things to be lies when told by a Republican.

TRUMP’S “LIES”

A good example of a “Trump lie,” according to the Left, is the one WaPo’s resident Lie Collector claims was repeated by Trump most often. It goes something like this:

“We also built the greatest economy in the history of the world…Powered by these policies, we built the greatest economy in the history of the world.”

This, quite obviously, is an opinion. Opinions, by definition, cannot be lies. That doesn’t stop WaPo from counting this particular “lie” a whopping 493 times! There are many ways to measure the “greatness” of an economy; thus, there are many ways in which to cherry-pick the numbers to back your claim that an economy is either “great” or “horrible.” If you wanted to prove that Trump presided over the greatest economy in the history of the world, you could simply look at GDP, which reached its highest point (pre-COVID) during his watch. Of course, the same is true of every president, as our GDP (thankfully) grows nearly every year.

If you wanted to prove the Trump economy was disastrous, you could look at the rate of GDP growth (as WaPo does to label this a “lie”), which shows that the growth rate under Trump wasn’t nearly as great as it was under LBJ, Eisenhower, or Bill Clinton. Of course, this is a disingenuous argument, given that all three men inherited economies that were emerging from a recession. It is far easier for an economy to experience tremendous growth after tremendous loss than it is to grow a healthy economy. It is also a disingenuous way of “fact-checking” Trump’s claim, as he never mentioned growth rate.

The height of the “fact check” ruse came in late April of this past year, when WaPo “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler bravely and boldly announced that he would no longer be counting the President’s “lies” after Biden’s first 100 days in office. “I have learned my lesson,” he tweeted. I suppose that lesson was: only fact-check Republicans, as all politicians are liars.

SMALL LIES VS. BIG LIES

Of course, not all lies are made the same. Some have far greater impact than others. For example, when Trump famously exaggerated the size of his crowds at each and every one of his rallies, the Left had a field day mocking such “lies.” At the end of the day, though, does it really matter? Trump is a salesman by trade. Salesmen deal in the realm of exaggeration and hyperbole. To Trump, everything he likes is “fantastic” and “beautiful” and “the greatest ever, believe me.” Everything he doesn’t like is “horrible” and “disastrous” and “low-rated.” These are his opinions, clearly exaggerated for effect. Again, opinions, by definition, are not lies.

Biden is famous for telling tall tales about events in his past that never actually happened. He has told the story, at least six times in the past two years, about how an Amtrak conductor told Joe, while he was serving as Vice President, that he had travelled a certain number of miles (a number that changes every time Joe tells the story), which was an all-time record for Amtrak. The problem with that story is that the conductor Joe names had retired over a decade before Joe became Vice President, and died a year before this conversation allegedly took place. Despite being “fact-checked” on this claim six times, Joe continues to tell this story.

Joe claimed to have visited a synagogue after a mass shooting in 2018, despite the fact that he was nowhere near it on the day the service was held. He claims to have hit a double off the wall in RFK Stadium during a congressional baseball game, despite the fact that the game wasn’t played at RFK until 2005 and no record of any such hit exists in any newspaper that covered these games, nor in the memory of anyone else who attended them. Joe also claimed to have played football for the University of Delaware, despite the fact that he is not listed on the roster in any year in which he attended the school.

Joe claimed that his first job offer came from the Idaho Lumber Company, but the company has responded that he never worked for them. Most recently, Joe gave a speech at an all-black college in which he claimed to be at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s, and led several walk-outs of segregated movie theaters and restaurants. It was hardly the first time he made this claim. The problem is that Joe himself debunked this lie way back in the 1980’s.

The most damaging of Joe’s “misremembrances” is his repeated assertion that a drunk driver killed his wife and daughter, when there is no evidence whatsoever that the driver of that vehicle was impaired. Who knows how much damage that driver’s reputation has taken over the years because of that lie. Tellingly, the “fact-checkers” at Snopes have labelled this lie a “mixture.” They claim that, while the police investigating the accident found no cause to charge the driver with DWI, some people in the community believe it may have been a factor. It’s funny just how far these “fact-checkers” will bend over backwards for their fellow Leftists.

Here’s the thing. I’m willing to give Joe a pass on all of these “lies.” I believe his brain is so far gone, he constantly confuses events and people and dates and places. It happens to the best of us, eventually. I don’t believe that any of the above are “lies” because I believe Joe believes what he is saying is true. In his demented world, these events actually happened as he misremembers them. Even if you were to wrongly label these as “lies,” they are the harmless type of lies that Trump told when he exaggerated his crowd sizes.

That said, there have been many lies told by Biden since becoming president that were blatant and destructive.

GEORGIA’S “RACIST” VOTING INTEGRITY LAWS

Last year, when the state of Georgia passed several laws designed to strengthen the integrity of their elections, the Left howled in protest. As I have written here before, the reason for their howling was entirely transparent. They had figured out a way to rig each and every election from now until eternity, and they were hell-bent on making those “emergency” measures permanent. Georgia closed those loopholes, and this sent the Left into a fit of rage.

Never mind the fact that Georgia’s election laws as they now stand are more expansive than the laws they had prior to 2020. Never mind the fact that Georgia’s new laws make it easier to vote than it was in 2019. The Left reacted to these new laws the way they react to everything: by screaming “RACIST!”

It doesn’t even matter that it makes no sense to scream “RACIST!” Leftists do it reflexively, out of habit. There is nothing “racist” about giving the state more oversight over county elections, limiting and regulating drop boxes, expanding the voting period, and requiring some bare-minimum proof of identity for absentee ballots. The most hilarious overreaction by the Left was when they screeched that people waiting in line to vote in Georgia would now die from dehydration because the new law “criminalized” handing out water! Of course, the law simply forbid campaign reps from handing out free gifts (including water) to those standing in line – just like the laws in most other states.

As the radical Left howled and screeched about these new “voter suppression” laws, a true President of the United States might have taken that opportunity to quell the hysteria and lower the temperature of the debate. Instead, Biden called the Georgia laws “Jim Crow on steroids!” He stood before the American people, looked directly into the camera, and lied to our faces. He claimed that Georgia’s laws restricted voting to 5:00pm. (They didn’t.) He claimed people standing in line weren’t allowed to drink water. (They were.) He claimed absentee voters could vote only in the most rigid circumstances (the opposite of the truth.)

The end result was that Major League Baseball, one of countless American corporations with a nasty habit of bending to the will of radical Leftists, pulled its midseason all-star game out of Atlanta. Millions in revenue and thousands of jobs were lost as a result. In the end, the people hurt most by Biden’s inflammatory lies were the people of Georgia – roughly half of whom were his supporters.

LYING JOE

In addition to his lies about the Georgia election laws, Whispering Joe has lied to our faces about the situation he inherited when he became president. When he claimed that he was left with “no plan” to handle to the vaccine rollout, this was such a blatant lie that even Dr. Fauci forced himself to rush to Trump’s defense. During an early December speech on the economy, Biden claimed that he inherited an unemployment rate that was over 14%.  Actually, it was only 6.3% when he took office. He also claimed that our economy was “on the brink of collapse” when he took over. Actually, our GDP had grown a whopping 33.4% in the most recent quarter before he took office.

During his first address to a joint session of congress, Biden made the audacious claim that “we” (meaning he and President Obama) followed Osama bin Laden to the “gates of Hell” and “delivered justice.” According to Obama himself, Biden was the only person in the room who objected to the plan to raid bin Laden’s compound on that fateful night.

Biden has made easily-debunked claims about his enormous spending bills, claiming that his “infrastructure” bill would create “19 million jobs,” and that his $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” plan would cost “zero dollars.” These claims were so ridiculous that even the Leftist “fact-checkers” were forced to throw a red flag on them. When the CBO completed its analysis of the bill and concluded that it would add $3 trillion to our debt, Team Biden labelled this conclusion “fake.”

On several occasions, Biden has looked into the camera and claimed, with a straight face, that what we are seeing with our own eyes isn’t real. On the issue of the Southern border crisis, he claimed that the surge in “migrant crossings” was “seasonal.” On the issue of inflation, he said there is no inflation because Larry Summers said so. (Except, Summers had just written an op-ed for the Washington Post titled, “The Inflation Risk is Real.”) Biden also called inflation “transitory,” as if it would disappear at any moment.

On the issue of Afghanistan, he claimed that Al Qaeda was “gone” from the country, that Americans at the Kabul embassy could easily get to the airport, and that our allies around the world all believed he did a fine job with that withdrawal. During one of his extremely rare one-on-one interviews, he told the evil little elf George Stephanopolos that not one of his military advisors recommended to him that we keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan to maintain the peace and stability of the region. Generals Mills and McKenzie later contradicted this claim in their congressional testimony. Oddly enough, no one from the media has followed up with Biden on that blatant lie.

THE LIAR IN CHIEF

Among the vast group of Leftists who spent four years screeching at the sky about President Trump’s “lying,” you won’t find many who have any problem at all with Biden’s lies. I was amused to read this article from Reason titled “Joe Biden Would Be a Better President if He Stopped Saying Things That Aren’t True.” Reason was once a reasonable source of information and opinions, but they went full Trump Deranged in 2016. The writer of that piece, Matt Welch, bends over backwards to make lemonade from the Biden lemon, and seems shocked that his president would lie to his face on multiple occasions.

Welch appears to be dumbstruck that the media isn’t covering Biden’s blatant lies the same way they covered Trump’s. He reports performing Google searches for key phrases from Biden lies and finding zero hits. “If elected executives can lie with impunity,” Welch writes, “they will lie with impunity…There’s a pandemic still on, and a world wracked with its usual uncertainties, and oncoming calamities we cannot currently see. Dishonest federal leadership will only make all of those things worse.”

Well, no duh.

It’s nice to see some folks on the left wake up to the reality that some lies are more dangerous than others. When our health, our lives, our nation’s sovereignty, our nation’s reputation, our children’s future, our safety from violent thugs, and our checkbooks are all on the line, honesty is critically important. In comparison, exaggerating the size of a crowd at a rally is absolutely meaningless. Yet, you will find countless folks on the Left who equate the two with a straight face.