The Washington Post “Fact Checker,” Glenn Kessler, is among the most biased of the breed. On the issue of the Obama Administration’s outright dishonesty on Social Security, however, he is embarrassing his paper and the entire Fact-Check community.
Lately, his strategy has been to bury obvious dishonesty by the Obama Administration and Democrats regarding Social Security in technical details, excusing straightforward misrepresentation (how’s that for an oxymoron?) and encouraging readers to shrug, give up, and move on
How nice for the President to have political allies posing as objective truth-tellers.
This morning, Kessler refused to condemn a statement that I was about to post as “Unethical Quote of the Week.” It still is that, but my head is spinning from Kessler’s gyrations trying to justify it. The quote:
“I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven’t resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.”
— President Obama, yesterday, July 12, discussing possible consequences of a failure to raise the debt ceiling.
The quote is unethical for two reasons. The first is that it Obama and his Treasury Secretary will have to choose what to pay for with the available revenue if the debt ceiling is raised. The president certainly can “guarantee” that those checks will go out if he wants to; he just prefers to frighten the elderly and create the impression that the Republicans are threatening their payments. The second is that the Obama administration is ethically estopped from making this claim. Over and over again, despite the fact that it is an outright lie, Obama officials have denied that Social Security contributes to the deficit or the debt. If Social Security doesn’t contribute to the debt, why is it threatened by not raising the debt ceiling? Obama’s number-crunchers, as recently as last Sunday on the network talk show, smugly explained in their best “you are all such idiots” manner how Social Security was rock solid because its empty coffers were backed by U.S. Government I.O.U.’s Really? Then why does the inability to borrow more money endanger those checks? And if the country has to borrow more money to send out the checks, why has the Administration been ridiculing the idea that Social Security is part of the debt crisis?
This con-game is unseemly for a President, unfair to the public, destructive to meaningful political discourse and dangerous for the nation. Yet Kessler’s verdict on Obama’s statement is a jaw-dropping “Verdict Pending.” I see… let the President dishonestly frighten Social security recipients without criticism on the grounds that maybe there is some reason he’s never admitted before that Social Security is in fact contributing to the nation’s financial crisis. Kessler won’t say he’s lying now, because he might have been lying all along!
That’s “verdict pending” to a Washington Post writer charged with revealing “The Truth Behind the Rhetoric”?
Maybe the Post can install a fact-checker for its fact-checker, at least when the Obama Administration’s deceit and deception on Social Security is being examined.
Ethics Alarms 
Maybe the Post should just fire him and put in a Politifact column.
What is the record of Kessler’s bias?
Spotty. Worse than Fact Check, much worse than Annenberg, better than most newspapers. His idea of “facts” is often “cherished liberal/progressive beliefs,” and he seems determined to come up with reasons why Obama’s whoppers aren’t. I’d say he’s mostly fair to conservatives; too quick to kind excuses for some of his personal favorites. I have sympathy for him—it’s a tough job, but a fact-checker has to also check his biases—at the door.