Fact Checking’s Final Frontier

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler doesn’t take issue with the facts, but with “suggestions”

Washington Free Beacon Editors • July 13, 2022 11:40 am

We at the Washington Free Beacon love the fact-checkers. When they’re “fact-checking” us, we know we must be doing something right.  

The righteousness of our reporting has pushed this genre of faux journalism to its very limits: rules bent, reasoning contorted, and the endless invention of new ways to accuse us of hurting Democrats purveying misinformation. 

The latest from the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler is a master class in the left’s crusade to conflate objective truth with Democratic spin. The ostensible target of his fisking: a tweet from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) based, as he notes, on a Free Beacon report about the Biden administration’s sale of a million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to China. 

Yes, the Biden administration did this, Kessler concedes. Them’s the facts. But three Pinocchios for Grassley and for us, he says, for turning “simple facts” into “something nefarious.” You know, like the fact that China was also supposed to be releasing oil from its reserves in order to ease global fuel prices, according to the White House, but is instead boosting its own reserves by hoarding barrels from our stockpile. 

But far be it from us to imply that the Biden administration’s strategy here is amiss: “Anyone who suggests the Biden administration is doing something wrong here—as opposed to following the rules—earns Three Pinocchios,” Kessler writes. 

Here’s how the fact-checker Democrat nexus works. White House adviser (and former “Grillary Clinton” apron model) Ian Sams is now waving Kessler’s assessment around on Twitter, accusing Republicans of “pushing false conspiracies about the President.” 

Our last run-in with the fact-checking community was over our massively viral video that plainly shows President Joe Biden shaking hands with thin air. Not true! they said, having studied the footage like the Zapruder film in order to conclude that what any viewer can see with his own eyes is “entirely misleading.” 

Before that, it was our report on the Biden administration’s plan to fund the distribution of crack pipes to drug addicts as part of its “harm reduction” approach to drug addiction. Fact checks, including Kessler’s, relied entirely on the ass-covering say-so’s of Biden administration officials to undermine our shoe leather reporting, which has now been corroborated by us and others. 

Your condemnation is the metric of our success, every Pinocchio and Pants on Fire another notch on our belt.