Joe Biden, liar liar liar

For a decade, reporters have happily called Donald Trump a liar. Biden just pardoned his son Hunter after repeatedly promising he would not. Yet even now the media protects him.

On Sunday night, Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter for gun- and tax-related felonies - undoing both a jury verdict in Delaware and Hunter’s own guilty plea in California.

The pardon is extraordinary and dangerous, especially at a time when both parties are playing a game of chicken with the open politicization of law enforcement. More on that issue soon.

But first it’s vital to point out the hypocrisy not just in what Biden did but in how the media is covering it.

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(Unreported Truths. Including hypocrisies. For less than 20 cents a day.)

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Biden promised he would not pardon Hunter. Unequivocally. Without exception. To take just one example, in June, ABC News anchor David Muir asked Biden directly:

“Have you ruled out a pardon for your son?”

“Yes,” Biden answered.

Give Biden the benefit of the doubt for a moment. Assume he wasn’t planning to pardon Hunter all along. Biden’s still lying. He gives himself no wriggle room in his answer, presumably because he knew anything but a flat denial would hurt him politically. (The interview occurred before his disastrous June 27 debate, when he was still running for a second term. Or, more accurately, shuffling for it.)

At best, Biden was unsure of what he might do - while claiming he was.

There’s a word for saying something that you know is not true.

That word is lie.

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(One’s a born liar, the other’s convicted. With apologies to Billy Martin.)

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For almost a decade now, top news outlets have openly called Donald Trump a liar.

“Lie” and “liar” are strong words, and journalists generally avoid them. As the Washington Post explained in a 2016 piece about the New York Times’s decision to use the word with Trump:

"Lie" is a very strong term — stronger than "false statement" or "factual inaccuracy" or just about any other way of saying something is untrue. News outlets generally avoid labeling even the most galling distortion or fabrication a "lie" because the word suggests that the person who spread the incorrect information was not merely mistaken, but did so intentionally.

That's a very hard thing to prove, so journalists almost always figure it is better to just call out what is wrong and let readers/viewers/listeners judge for themselves how to label it.

But once the Times decided it was okay to call Trump a liar, it and other outlets did so eagerly - even gleefully. And not just in opinion pieces, but in what the good ol’ days was called “straight news.”

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(Liar liar newspaper on fire!)

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Does Donald Trump exaggerate? Yes? Does he tell tall tales? Yes. (I don’t think I will ever forget his speculations about what he would do if he was in an electric boat that started to sink in water full of sharks.)

Does he mislead? Yes. Does he elide the truth? Yes. All politicians do.

Does Trump willfully misspeak and say things he knows are untrue?

That is, does he lie?

He sure does. All politicians do that too. The legendary Times Washington columnist Russell Baker once described political journalism as “sitting in marble corridors waiting for important people to lie.”

But, again, imputing motive is hard. It’s even harder in partisan settings, when both sides are constantly screaming liar at each other. That’s why - before Trump - reporters usually tried not to do it with absolutely clear evidence.

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(Clear evidence. Unreported Truths. With your help.)

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Those days are gone. Supposedly objective and non-partisan reporters now regularly throw around “lie” and “liar” - at least against Trump. But they will almost¹ never use those words for Democrats.

In December 2020, Joe Biden promised vaccination would never be mandatory. Nine months later, he instituted Covid vaccine mandates. The media rarely even pointed out that he’d made a massive policy refusal, much less asked him whether he’d been lying initially.

Now Biden has gone even further. But the media is still covering for him. What he did last night was not a “remarkable turnaround,” as the New York Times wrote, or a “controversial decision,” per the Washington Post.

Again, even the most generous interpretation of last night’s pardon is that it proves Biden was lying in his earlier flat denials. He was lying, so he’s a liar.

And if the media won’t tell the truth about what he did, they’re liars too.

1. I’d lie to lose the almost, but there’s always an exception.