If you needed any more proof that the fix is in this election…
Pretty much anyone who endured last night’s first presidential debate came to the same conclusion — it was like watching a monorail jump its track and crash into a train trestle, then falling onto an overpass before plummeting to a runway. But amid the universal disgust CNN arrived with its assessment of the show and came away with its unique interpretation.
Daniel Dale was on with Wolf Blitzer in a post-debate wrap-up segment and he came on to deliver his product. Dale’s task at the network is an anointed fact-checker of the politicians, and listening to his rundown of the event it appears he took half the night off. Much like his network co-worker Brian Stelter, who seems to be a media reporter who only covers Fox News, Dale only seemed to have the audio feed from Donald Trump.
How else to explain this dose of skewed interpretational detailing of what we had all just witnessed.
CNN's @ddale8 says while Joe Biden was "largely accurate" during tonight's presidential debate, "we had an avalanche of lying from Pres. Trump."
He says at points during the debate, "almost every single thing (Trump) said … was inaccurate" #Debates2020 https://t.co/yBujJDilRC pic.twitter.com/uTN68wyauN
— CNN (@CNN) September 30, 2020
Dale makes only the faintest effort to be critical of Joe Biden, while insisting that almost all of the lies told on stage came from the President. ”We had an avalanche of lying from President Trump. Biden, conversely, made at least a couple false or misleading claims, but largely he was accurate.’’ A couple, he says. Daniel must have been whaling recently off the New England coastline to gather up enough lamp oil to resort to this level of gaslighting of the CNN audience.
His synopsis of Donald Trump’s prevarications went like this – ”These have been fact-checked, and he keeps saying them, and they’re still wrong.’’ Yet while Biden perfectly fit that very description throughout the night Dale completely excuses the Vice President presenting tales that have long been disproven. Biden repeatedly spat out lies that have recently been delivered in the media as ‘’bombshells’’, a sign of the collusion hinted at between the press and his campaign.
These are charges made which have withered and died under the harsh light of facts, something Daniel Dale is charged specifically to tabulate, yet fails to do spectacularly here. So to aid the CNN arbiter of the facts allow me to list off the lies that Biden belched out during his ‘’mostly accurate’’ debate performance.
- Joe Biden mentioned Vladamir Putin and the bounties paid out to target US soldiers in the Mid East. The major news outlets blasted this story from the New York Times for weeks with the claim the President received notice in a daily briefing that our soldiers were targeted and he completely dismissed the claim. In truth the press had been fed a low-level intel report that had never been given credence and was not passed up the White House level. The military has investigated this story for months and never came up with evidence.
- Joe Biden claims President Trump called white supremacists ”very fine people’’. This one is largely on Chris Wallace, who led off a question to Biden by repeating this debunked phrase. While long established in the full context of that infamous speech that Trump in fact condemned those people, here Biden continued to repeat the lie that, as Daniel Dale might say, has long been fact-checked but he keeps saying it.
- Joe Biden repeated the claim President Trump called soldiers killed in wars ”losers’’ and was the reason he skipped a cemetery ceremony in France. – This was the laughed-out-of-the-news report from The Atlantic that had been proven otherwise years ago and was now based entirely on anonymous sources. It was so roundly debunked that even Trump’s critics disputed the claims.
- Joe Biden repeated the lie that Trump only paid $750 in taxes. This is just the latest example of a fizzled September Surprise from The New York Times, one that was completely disproven by the very same article where deep in the piece it attested that Trump in fact had paid millions of dollars in his tax filings.
- Joe Biden claimed that the Green New Deal was not his plan. This was an exchange that is hard for Dale to miss. In one sentence Biden touted how the Green New Deal would pay for itself, then when challenged on it by Chris Wallace seconds later Biden said that it was not part of his energy plan. Except, this Mean Biden is oblivious to what appears on his own website, where it states clearly the GND is the basis of his energy proposal.
JOE BIDEN TONIGHT – ''The Green New Deal is not my plan.''
Joe Biden's Website – ''Green New Deal is the framework of our plan''. pic.twitter.com/l6BU20Sc7P
— Brad Slager Mail-splaining and Voter Resignation (@MartiniShark) September 30, 2020
- Joe Biden maintained there were no problems found with mail-in voting. This is one that Daniel Dale specifically called out as a Donald Trump lie, despite so many stories coming out just this week about mail-in problems that one could call it an ”avalanche’’ of reports. New York has bungled its voting, Virginia has mailed out thousands of duplicate ballots, many people have reported receiving ballots at their homes for various names, and even the latest from Wisconsin where postal trays filled with ballots were found in a ditch.
- Joe Biden Claimed the Trump tax cuts did not help low wage workers. This is based on the media focused on the wealthy getting larger savings, ignoring that they also paid higher taxes and at higher rates, so a cut would benefit them at a higher total. But 90% of workers experienced tax cut benefits like higher paychecks, greater tax refunds, lower utility bills, and increases in 401K values.
- Joe Biden claimed we are in a recession. There was all manner of economic entanglements for Biden, where he at once was trying to blame a bad economy on Trump while at the same time claiming that any positive news about the economy was credited to the Obama/Biden administration. This was something even the New York Times fact-checked as FALSE. As all know the current financial situation is artificially impacted by the Covid crises, and all indicators — from job growth to the stock market — show a surging recovery back to pre-pandemic levels.
- Joe Biden claimed Trump did nothing about the pandemic in February. What Joe relies upon here is again media cover. The press has been beating on Trump for months over his alleged inactivity in the early weeks of the outbreak, completely misrepresenting the actions and accomplishments made in that time. Lost in the lack of vetting Biden on this charge are his own words at the time and his call for action well after things had already been enacted. Recall, it was Biden who called Trump xenophobic when he made the travel ban from China, something CNN is laughably trying to reinterpret.
- Joe Biden claimed that President Trump had cut police funding. This was a lame attempt made by Biden and Harris just after the Democrat convention when they saw poll numbers showing large opposition to the violent protests. These cuts were part of sweeping budgetary changes made in response to the Covid shutdowns. Trump did not defund the police, he was cutting everything during a financial crises.
- Joe Biden claimed that Antifa Antifa is an idea, not an organization. In a way of avoiding condemning this violent left-wing outfit Biden tried to claim it is a gauzy ideal that cannot be pinned down, citing FBI Director Christopher Wray as saying such. What Wray has actually said is, “Antifa is a real thing. We have any number of properly predicated investigations into what we would describe as violent anarchist extremists and some of those individuals self-identify with Antifa.’’
Certainly there could be more items to pick through from Joe’s scattered delivery over the course of 90 minutes of contentious debates. But just looking over this list of significant policy items it seems quite clear that Biden himself was engaging in quite a bit of his own level of falsified discourse last night.
As for Daniel Dale declaring that Biden’s night could be measured as ”Mostly accurate’’ we have to look over the evidence and label his claim as MOSTLY FALSE.