All through 2021, the media, President Biden, his workers and quite a few different high figures deluged audiences with radically deceptive, revealing and flat-out fallacious statements. Herewith is a take a look at a number of the 12 months’s worst.
— Compiled by The Put up Editorial Board
This assurance
“There’s going to be no circumstances the place you’re going to see folks being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the USA from Afghanistan.” — President Biden, July 8
We are saying: Oops. The similarities between the evacuation of the US embassy in Saigon, Vietnam, after the town fell in 1975 and events in Afghanistan in August have been as eerie as they have been tragic.
This assertion
“We’re really seeing a decline in homicides and shootings.” — Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, July 25
We are saying: When Lightfoot made that preposterous claim, the greater than 300 murders in Chicago have been already greater than they’d been to that time in any 12 months for a decade. This month, they topped 800, the most in more than a quarter-century.
This metaphor
“That is Jim Crow within the twenty first Century.” — President Biden, March 26, referring to a brand new election legislation in Georgia
We are saying: Biden was suggesting that Georgia, and different states that amended their voting legal guidelines, had sought to disenfranchise black voters and revive segregation. Worse, he later called the changes the “most severe check of our democracy because the Civil Battle.” Ugly stuff. In reality, many of the modifications merely addressed voter fraud and in some circumstances, as in Georgia, really expanded entry to voting.
This declare
“Assaults on me fairly frankly are assaults on science.” — Dr. Anthony Fauci, June 9
We are saying: Fauci has used versions of this line usually to suggest that he’s bought a monopoly on COVID science and there might be no debate. Although he’s flip-flopped on quite a few points. The vanity is past beautiful.
Spot the distinction
“Anybody who’s answerable for that many [COVID] deaths mustn’t stay as president of the USA of America.” — Then-candidate Joe Biden, Oct. 22, 2020
“Look, there isn’t a federal resolution. This will get solved at a state stage.” — President Biden, Dec. 27, 2021
We are saying: Again when Donald Trump was president and head of the federal authorities, Biden held him answerable for the deaths brought on by the coronavirus. But now that Biden’s in cost and America has seen extra COVID deaths on his watch than on Trump’s, suddenly there’s “no federal solution” — it’s as much as the states to unravel this, so don’t blame Biden. Handy, no?
This tweet
We are saying: Academics-union boss Randi Weingarten doesn’t want to be blamed for pushing faculties to remain closed even after scientists mentioned it was secure to open them. However the reality is, she and teachers unions across the nation did fight, usually efficiently, for countless closures that took an enormous toll on children.
This response
“It’s clearly about what we have to do within the local weather disaster.” — Vice President Kamala Harris, Dec. 26, when requested what she noticed as “the most important national-security problem confronting the US”
We are saying: China and Russia are striking US satellites, launching cyberattacks on US entities, threatening neighbors and constructing harmful new weapons. Iran is pursuing nukes. However the veep thinks “the local weather disaster” — together with threats to “democracy,” i.e., voter-integrity legal guidelines, which she additionally cited — is one in every of our largest national-security challenges. Perhaps her aim is to make Biden appear much less indifferent by comparability.
This declare
“There’s a important improve within the variety of folks coming to the border within the winter months of January, February, March. It occurs yearly.” — President Biden, March 25
We are saying: On the time, the surge at the border was higher than it normally is for these months, but as a substitute of dropping after March as Biden implied they might, the numbers solely grew higher nonetheless. By October, the 1.7 million arrests at America’s southern border marked an all-time excessive.
This tweet
We are saying: When New York Instances science reporter Apoorva Mandavilli posted this truly wacky tweet, an increasing number of scientists, officers and even the media had already begun to confess the chance that the COVID bug escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. That’s now a number one principle — and it by no means had something to do with racism.
This promise
“A lot of the worth will increase we’ve seen are . . . anticipated to be non permanent.” — President Biden, July 19
We are saying: As soon as once more, occasions zoomed within the actual opposition route as Biden predicted. As an alternative of costs leveling off, they’ve been hovering quicker than they’ve in a long time.
