This is progress, I suppose, and it doesn’t auger well for President Biden’s 2024 campaign if the most Democratic propaganda-minded members of the mainstream media (like CNN) starts actually critiquing his persistently embarrassing performance as President. Some of the usual suspects mentioned Biden’s increasingly typical imaginary story, but most buried it in their news report. MSNBC was one of the few that did headline the lie, but did so to explain that Biden did visit the site of the tragedy nine days later (the White House “explanation”) so don’t be so nit-picky. It also had Lawrence O’Donnell engage in a bit of obvious whataboutism, as he ignored Biden’s falsehood but ranted about “Donald Trump’s most vile lie about 9/11” that he “lost hundreds of friends” on 9/11. Otherwise, Biden’s false claim was highlighted by the New York Post, the National Review, Fox News (of course), and other conservative media, plus the least biased and most reliable (but still left-leaning) of the fact-checking services, Fact-check.org.
CNN didn’t pull any punches, writing in its piece,
Another false claim about his own past
It’s possible, of course, that Biden genuinely misremembered when his visit to Ground Zero occurred. As president, though, he has repeatedly made false claims about his past.
He did it three times in a single speech last month – falsely claiming to have witnessed a bridge collapse in Pittsburgh in 2022 (he actually visited the site more than six hours after the collapse), falsely claiming his grandfather had died just days prior to his own birth at the same hospital (his paternal grandfather died more than a year prior in another state), and again repeating a long-debunked false story about a supposed conversation with an Amtrak conductor who was deceased at the time the story would have had to take place.
In 2021 and 2022, he falsely claimed to have been arrested during a civil rights protest (he had previously said merely that an officer had taken him home from a protest), falsely claimed he “used to drive an 18-wheeler” (the White House said he once had a job driving a different vehicle, a school bus), falsely claimed to have visited the Pittsburgh synagogue where worshippers were killed in a 2018 mass shooting (he had spoken to its rabbi by phone but had not gone), falsely claimed to have visited Iraq and Afghanistan as president (he made repeated visits as a senator and vice president but not as president), told a false story involving a late relative and the Purple Heart, and falsely described his interactions decades ago with late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.
Well, good. It’s about damn time.
If, as everybody dreads (or should), the show-down in 2024 ends up being between Trump and Biden, the long-time resistance/Democrat/ mainstream media talking point that Trump lies all the time has to be retired, doesn’t it?
Ethics Alarms 
Of course not. Just picture what Keith Olbermann will say about this. “Trump’s a liar. Joe’s just a politician. They all do it. Joe’s a good guy. His heart’s in the right place. Trump’s evil.” These people are sociopaths.
I doubt it, Keith once made a tweet about Trump that consisted entirely of the words Nazi and fuck. He wouldn’t even bother with a semi-erudite statement like that. He has the maturity and intelligence of a 2-year-old and is enough of a jerk that I wish someone would grab him and bang his head against the nearest hard surface until he died.
“I wish someone would grab him and bang his head against the nearest hard surface until he died.”
You’re by no means alone, but consider settling for the next best thing; Ann Coulter’s hilariously brutal evisceration:
Olbermann’s Plastic Ivy
Ann says, ‘Olbermann’s incessant lying about having an “Ivy League education” when he went to the non-Ivy League ag school at Cornell would be like a graduate of the Yale locksmithing school boasting about being a “Yale man.”’
There’s a town about twenty miles north of New Haven on I-81 called Yalesville. I’ve always thought they could open a JC there, call it “Yalesville,” and then anyone who went there, when asked where they went to college, they could say “Yalesville, Daddy-O!”
It would be nice if this represented an actual turnabout from being Democratic Party Stenographers with Press Passes, but I doubt it.
CNN and others of its ilk have long known that Biden is at least as much of a liar as Trump, and chosen not to report it. They can’t ignore that there’s fire underneath all the smoke of the “family business.” Therefore, I think it more likely that this is an early salvo in an orchestrated defenestration of Joe Biden. They know they’re screwed if he actually runs in ’24.
Hope they have time to do Harris as well. But you can count on CNN and others to remain just as dishonest and do just as much gaslighting going forward. The only difference is that it will be in the service of someone else.
And to my previous point… here’s a fawning, bootlicking appeal from the Washington Post citing what a marvelous guy Joe is but that he should get the hell out.
They’re coming for you, Mr. President.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/12/biden-trump-election-step-aside/
MONEY QUOTE: “In sum, he has been a successful and effective president.”
Response: You gotta be f*****g kidding!
Months ago the standard talking point was the Biden administration simply hadn’t been good at “messaging.” Now it’s “Bidenomics is good for you, you just don’t know it.” Assholes.
Response: David Ignatius is a Democratic party hack.
I prefer “party operative.”
I’ve been thinking lately how “gaslighting” has replaced “lying.” I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Why use a word that involves a reference to an obscure movie to describe something as rudimentary as lying.
I think the term is to represent a more insidious form of lying–doing so repeatedly and to the degree about easily observed events that the recipient doubts their own perception.
An example would be the steady claim over the past ten years that suppression of some social media voices was purely algorithmic and couldn’t be a function of bias or government influence.
I guess Jeff Bezos wants Gavin Newsom?
Given the majority of the piece reads like a collection of Dem talking points unhinged from reality before it asks Joe to step aside, this must be party doctrine. I guess Joe is toast. Someone should tell Dr. Jill.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/12/media/white-house-letter-news-executives/
Sounds like the mainstream news takes it’s editorial positions straight from the White House. Here is CNN dutifully calling Republicans liars in the same article where it announces it got white house orders to call Republicans liars.
Babylon Bee stuff.
Nothing to see here. No proof Biden’s a crook. Republicans pounce. It’s all Trump’s fault. He was the one who got himself impeached twice, after all. Dems had nothing at all to do with it. They respect norms. https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/13/politics/impeachment-biden-mccarthy/index.html
Clearly, CNN got the message.
If Trump wins the GOP nomination, the Dems can run Iran’s supreme leader and he’d win in a landslide—and I say as someone who does not particularly despise Trump and who appreciates how the Dems/MSM/BigTech/Deep State conspired against him.
GOP is truly the stupid party (partly because it lacks machines and cohesive strategy that Dems have, and partly because large segment of its voters take pride in voting to stick it to the other side rather than with eye on a achieving what elections are all about: winning or at least other side from winning).
There will be massive mail in “voting,” and massive ballot harvesting, and the Dems could run Elmer Fudd and they’ll win. Who worries about polls say about voter preferences when you control the polls, as in polling places?
I am sadly, more cynical. I think they are pretending to Fact Check Biden, by deliberately choosing meaningless lies. What difference does it make if Biden was at Ground Zero the “next day” or “next week”? Biden supporters will ignore it as a minor oversight, while viciously condemning Trump for the exact same kind of willful/unwilfully inaccuracy.
The media has reported every Trump “lie”, knowing it would rally their readers foaming at the mouths. They are doing the same with Biden, knowing their readers will look away and/or make whataboutisms. They knew they are treating Trump unfairly, but also know that they can treat Biden exactly the same way without consequence.
Suddenly, their unfair treatment of Trump is now “fair”.
It’s almost like the Democrats blinked first in the highest stakes game of chicken I’ve ever seen: Which party will allow their frontrunner to be the least popular person in it for longest? Answer: The Republicans, who are still looking like Trump’s going to make it to 2024.
I said before, hate-voting only lasts so long, you only get away with “What? Are you going to vote for the other guy?” so long before people actually consider it. I’ve said this before: No one voted for Joe because they wanted to vote for Joe, his party, or a progressive agenda. They were voting against trump and would have supported an animatronic lawn gnome…. Which, now that I think of it, would only have been slightly less spry than Joe.
Eventually you’re going to want to field a candidate that can win, not because they’re marginally better than the other guy, but because people want to vote for them. It really does feel like American national politics is a massive race-to-the-bottom exercise in trying to out-bad the competition so that the electorate is confused and remains balanced on a razor’s edge.
I don’t know that Newsom is The Guy, I mean, not only would his record in California be fair game, but he’s outright said that Kamala Harris is Joe Biden’s natural successor (I read this as him saying that he’s not ready for this cycle). Kamala certainly isn’t The Guy, she has a personality only slightly less approachable than that animatronic lawn gnome I was talking about earlier. So where does that leave them? Kathy Hochul? Gretchen Whittmer? Nancy Pelosi? Debbie Wasserman-Shultz? Joe Fetterman? Their bench is so shallow it isn’t even funny, and yet they’re still in the running. Why? Because a majority of Republicans want Donald Trump more than they want to win.
“Kamala certainly isn’t The Guy, she has a personality only slightly less approachable than that animatronic lawn gnome”
How dare you slight the lawn gnome so?
Of course the problem is about the same for the other side. I’d just about vote for the lawn gnome to avoid voting for Joe or Kamala, which is why, if all else fails, I’ll probably vote for Trump, which makes people think that I’m a Trump voter. This chicken/egg conundrum of which side is worse is exactly the race to the bottom of the barrel that you describe.
Is there actually historical precedent where a party denied a candidate a spot on their primary ballot?
I think the place to do this would have been to refuse to put his name on the primary ballot in 2015. Now that he’s running as a kind-of incumbent? Untenable.
I don’t think Trump is a lock for the nomination. It’s not decided on a national basis, but state by state. If you look at the polls for Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina it is definitely closer. Not that Trump doesn’t still have a big, big lead but not nearly as much as the national polls.
Also the national polls all seem to be done with registered not likely voters. We’ll see.
Except CNN isn’t magically treating the Biden like they treated Trump by merely pointing out false claims.
Recall CNN along with the rest of the left wing media actively advanced and focused on lies about Trump as though it was true.
Not doing that with Biden. Of course they shouldn’t.
No, the only reason they’re now focusing on little lies is to completely avoid doing real journalism by pursuing the fetid Biden crime family’s rotten international dealings. But they can still say “look, we’re doing the journal thing, Biden lied about where he was 20+ years ago”