When Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler awards someone with a “Pinocchio,” it is not a compliment, since the award is named for the fictional wooden boy whose nose grew each time he told a lie.
Typically, Kessler’s Fact Checker column will hand out one to four Pinocchios to fib-fuddled recipients, but Monday morning—on the eve of the national midterm elections—Joe Biden earned the disreputable distinction of receiving a “bottomless Pinocchio” for his habitual and repetitive falsehoods. While the Kessler column pointed to canards about Social Security, traveling with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the price of gasoline and student loan forgiveness, a report at Fox News also pointed to another of Biden’s pet prevarications: gun control and the Second Amendment.
Back in June, according to a Fox News report at the time, Biden “told reporters on Memorial Day that the Second Amendment didn’t allow for the ownership of cannons when it was adopted as part of the Bill of Rights in 1791.” As it turned out, that claim was just as much malarkey as are many of Biden’s other tales. At that time, people actually did own cannons, and small “swivel guns” were occasionally mounted on river boats, while cannons were found in many settlements.
Earlier this year, Biden’s misrepresentation of facts about the Second Amendment compelled Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, to declare, “Every time Joe Biden repeats this canard, he reinforces the notion that he is a habitual, pathological liar.”
At one point in April, Gottlieb stated, “The president needs to reload his brain before shooting off his mouth.”
Writing Monday in the Washington Post, Kessler stated, “President Biden is a self-described ‘gaffe machine.’ That’s no excuse, of course, for a president making false or misleading statements. Readers have asked for fact checks of a variety of recent Biden statements, but none of them seemed big enough for a stand-alone fact check.”
So, Kessler put several of these “gaffes” together, resulting in the Bottomless Pinocchio award.
Depending upon the outcome of the midterms, Biden’s penchant for peddling myths may be put in check. Should he lose Congress, or at least one half of it, the president could essentially be considered a lame duck, at which point the White House press corps, and the broader media, may no longer play softball with the administration.
