Over the last month or so, the Biden administration has faced questions from the press on whether or not he has plans to visit the southern border to see the crisis for himself and if he’s ever visited it in the entirety of his near-50 year political career in Washington, D.C.
In late September, Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked White House press secretary Jen Psaki specifically about whether or not Biden had ever visited the southern border. Psaki responded by telling him “I will have to look back in my history books and check the times he’s been to the southern border. I’d be happy to.”
The two have had some more back and forths since then on the issue, but Psaki never “circled back” to give Doocy an answer to the original question.
On Thursday during the Biden CNN town hall, moderator Anderson Cooper asked Biden point-blank if he “had plans to visit the southern border?” Here was Biden’s response:
“I’ve been there before and I haven’t – I mean, I know it well. I guess I should go down. But the whole point of it is I haven’t had a whole hell of a lot of time to get down. I’ve been spending time going around looking at the $900 billion worth of damage done by – by hurricanes and floods and weather and traveling around the world.”
Considering, as Doocy also pointed out last month, there’s no record of him ever visiting the border, Biden’s answer was a bit of a shock to a lot of people, including members of our Democrat-apologist media apparatus.
So Washington Post “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler got busy doing some research, and all he could come up with was a drive-by Biden made in 2008 in the midst of the Obama-Biden campaign. (Emphasis added.)
But after digging some more, we discovered that Biden briefly drove past the border while on a campaign swing in 2008.On Oct. 17, he held a rally in Mesilla, N.M. The press officer on the trip, David E. Wade, told The Fact Checker that the plane landed at the El Paso airport and then the motorcade took the nearly one-hour drive to the suburb of Las Cruces. The drive took Biden along a route that for a few minutes hugs the border of the United States and Mexico. “For most of us, it was unfamiliar territory,” Wade said, who recalled that some reporters joked about crossing the border during the event.
Just to give you a visual, Hot Air’s John Sexton speculated on the likely route Biden’s motorcade took on that drive-by. Here’s what he came up with:
I mean, that indeed was a textbook case of a drive-by. It was not a “border visit” by any stretch of the imagination any more than the drive home to North Carolina a friend and I took from New York City after 9/11 constituted a “visit” to Tennessee even though our alternative route took us to the northeastern tip of the state (we didn’t stop).
Nevertheless, Kessler did what fact-checkers at his news organization have been known for over the years: cover for Democrats the best way they can.
Instead of giving Biden four Pinocchios for what even Kessler acknowledged was not true (even though he didn’t use the actual words “not true”), Kessler proclaimed that because it was supposedly a “gotcha” question (really?) and that because Biden’s motorcade did “drive-by” the border that one time, he was going to leave the claim “unrated”:
Whether the president has ever visited the border — or will — is a bit of a gotcha question. Given the level of briefings a president receives, a visit may not necessarily add to his body of knowledge. The Biden White House has certainly taken pains to not suggest the border surge is a crisis — which a presidential visit would suggest.But the president was asked a question about when he would visit the border, and he responded that he has “been there before.” It turns out it was a brief drive-by — not the kind of sustained visit that his critics are demanding. It’s almost like counting a refueling stop as a visit to a country. But it’s enough that we will leave this unrated.
I mean, come on. If Biden’s claim was not a lie, I don’t know what is. It was deserving of four Pinocchios, at the very least three. But it gets zero.
And without missing a beat, guess who cited Kessler’s “fact check” (though he was not named) as evidence of a Biden “border visit”? Psaki on Friday, in another exchange with Doocy. This one has to be seen to be believed:
It’s important to nail the Biden administration down on his lie because in making the “misleading” claim, he’s getting people to assume that he’s in touch and in tune with what’s happening and actively working to get the issue under control. But as I wrote Saturday, a 2008 “drive-through” by then-VP nominee Joe Biden did not constitute expertise and knowledge about the border situation even then, let alone as to the current crisis, the blame for which can be laid squarely at the feet of Joe Biden himself.
After I read Kessler’s piece, I was reminded of a tweet from leading CRT critic Chris Rufo, who has been a constant target for media types like Kessler because he’s been very effective at exposing what CRT is as well as its defenders:
In other words, the fact-checking industry has to be destroyed in order to save it. And while they’re doing a fine job of it on their own, the onus is also on their critics to put them on full blast on social media and in pieces like this one to amplify and thoroughly shame them over their failures. It’s the only way some of them will ever learn.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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