Column: The 'Fact Checkers' and the Big Lie

June 10th, 2020 5:47 AM

In August of 2016, The Washington Post promoted a new book by its reporters titled Trump Revealed that sounded an alarm. A book blurb from USA Today announced “Any voter who is not already devoted to Trump's cause will find plenty of reason to think long and hard about whether to support him after reading this book.”

The Post wrote no book in 2016 on Hillary Clinton Revealed. No one needed a warning about her.

Now in June of 2020, the Post is promoting a new election-year book, from the “Fact Checker” squad at The Post – their chief Glenn Kessler and his lieutenants Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly. The title is Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President’s Falsehoods, Misleading Claims, and Flat-Out Lies. It will land softly on the liberal bookshelf next to the Post’s other 2020 opus,A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America.

Unfortunately, an ad for the Kessler book in the paper quoted Trump as boasting “I have the greatest economy in the history of this country,” and dated it “Dec. 18, 2020.” It’s sad when your Fact Checker advertisements contain glaring errors.

The Post is well-known for starting a database of Trump’s “false and misleading statements” and their count recently passed 19,000. Donald Trump has a casual relationship with the truth. Even MAGA-hat-wearing Trump boosters know it. It’s easy pickings for “fact checkers” when he claims windmills cause cancer. But many of the Post “Pinocchios” are awarded for boasting.

We’ve just seen the most common “lie,” Trump talking up the “greatest economy in the history of this country.” The Post has routinely flagged Trump for claiming black unemployment was lowest “in the history of our country,” when it’s only been measured since 1972.

These same nitpicking police have allowed Barack Obama and Joe Biden to boast there was never a scandal during their tenure. That’s an obvious bald-faced lie. But Kessler wrote in 2017 “We are going to leave this without a rating. As we noted, scandals are in the eye of the beholder.”

There’s a Big Lie at the end of the “Fact Checker” book, and it was a passage from page 261, in their concluding chapter, titled “Toward a Resurgence of Truth.” It was plucked out and celebrated by CNN’s Brian Stelter, since it’s a favorite Big Lie on the Left. They make the claim that Trump is like a dictator.

“A hallmark of authoritarian regimes is to call truth into question -- except as the regime defines it. Russian president Vladimir Putin offers up a fog of disinformation to maintain power, including denying obvious facts (such as Russian involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17), spouting falsehoods and deflecting attention with nonsensical comparisons (dubbed 'whataboutism')."

Then the authors quote former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul: "A cumulative effect of all these tactics is nihilistic debasement of the very concept of truth."

This “authoritarian” lie was repeated when Kessler appeared on Morning Joe on June 2. Mika Brzezinzki said Trump isn’t just assaulting truth. “It’s also an assault on our democracy.” Kessler said “Correct.”

This is what Kessler calls a “Bottomless Pinocchio,” an often-repeated untruth. Donald Trump is not a dictator. Nobody’s jailing anyone at The Washington Post for maintaining anti-Trump databases and screaming “Democracy Dies in Darkness” like a panic-stricken teenager on the front page every day.

We’re having an election in November. No one cancelled it.  But liberal journalists speculate that imaginary tyrant Trump will never leave office if he loses....which is laughable, since they’ve never accepted he was legitimately elected in the first place.