Washington Post and NYT's DNC 'Fact Checking' Will Break Your Brain

Pinocchio is dead, and that cricket isn't feeling too great either.

Is there some kind of crisis going on in fact-check-land? First we had the-site-that-rhymes-with-nopes claiming that “Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People’,” even though we all saw and heard him with our very own eyeballs and earholes, just three days after activist Heather Heyer was murdered by James Fields. And now Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler has published some hair-splitting and “don’t believe your lyin’ eyes”-ing for the first night of the DNC that reads like dark satire, including — speaking of both sides! — the same questioning of the meaning of Trump’s “fine people” comment that we all heard Trump say. Objective reality, what even is it?

The paper issued one correction to its fact-checking, but the rest of the mind-scrambling bullshit still stands, apparently. You gotta read it yourself to believe it!

The correction that WaPo eventually issued a correction for was about Hillary Clinton’s claim about Kamala Harris: “She won’t be sending love letters to dictators.”

“This is in the eye of the beholder. There’s no evidence that Trump sent such letters,” Kessler sniffed. And, “we do not know what Trump wrote to Kim.”

If it’s “in the eye of the beholder,” then that’s not an incorrect fact, now, is it? So why was it even there? And as it happens there is quite a lot of evidence that Trump and Kim sent letters. Loving ones, even! And we DO know what’s in them, from the Post’s own Bob Woodward, in his book Rage. Woodward was not allowed to keep copies of the letters that Trump showed him, and later allegedly stashed in his Mar-a-Lago shitter, but Woodward read them into his tape recorder and transcribed them, and you can read them for yourself right here in Foreign Policy magazine.

Before Trump and Kim’s summit in 2019, where Trump SALUTED a North Korean general, Trump wrote, “I look forward to seeing you next week. It will be great. Best wishes.” Best wishes! Yes, best wishes to the guy who’s killed hundreds of his own citizens, including his own uncle and brother, at least 421 of his own officials, and held American citizen Otto Warmbier hostage, before sending him home brain-damaged to die. “Best wishes” and “your friend” is sure a lot of love towards a dictator who held a fellow citizen hostage.

And we all saw and heard Trump himself blubbering in 2018 about Kim, “We fell in love, okay? No, really, he wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.” Sure sounds like love letters confirmed!

The Post issued a correction: “A previous version of this article incorrectly said that the contents of Donald Trump’s letters to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un were not known. Parts of the letters were revealed in a 2020 book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward, after Trump permitted him to read the letters into his tape recorder at the White House. This article has been corrected.”

Well, that’s big of them, but there’s more, so much more.

Don’t believe your own eyes and ears when it comes to what Trump said about abortion!

“It has to be some form of punishment for the woman. Yeah, there has to be some form,” said Trump in a DNC video. Wrote Kessler, “Trump quickly walked back this statement.” 

So what? He still said it! You can watch him saying it right here!

Trump issued a statement saying he didn’t mean it, and that the doctor should be punished instead. But he still fucking said it, and it’s not factually wrong to say that he did!

What else? The Post “fact checked” the statement that Trump “told us to inject bleach into our bodies,” with a quote where he … says a word salad that sure sounds a whole lot like telling people to inject disinfectant. 

“I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.”

Back then lots of people sure thought that’s exactly what he meant! Poisonings with household disinfectant went up 121 percent right after he said it.

There was also a “fact check” from the Post’s Amy Gardener that’s simply baffling.

“‘Donald Trump says he will refuse to accept the election result if he loses again,’ Biden said. But that’s not true. Trump just hasn’t said that he would accept. And he previously said the only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat.”

Er, what? If he will only accept the results of the election if he wins, would it not logically follow that he will reject the results if he loses? But Trump literally did not say the words “I will refuse to accept the election result if I lose,” so therefore, doesn’t count! Shades of how right-wing SCOTUS ruled that payoffs aren’t bribery if you call them a tip, that’s only if the money comes in bags with a dollar sign and the word “BRIBE” written on the side in Sharpie.

And the Post “fact checked” Biden’s quote: “We know from his own chief of staff, four-star Gen. John Kelly, that Trump while in Europe would not go to the gravesites in France of the brave service members who gave their lives in this country, he called them ‘suckers and losers.’” 

Kelly did not exactly say this, Kessler claims, because these were two separate occasions! Here’s the full quote from the Atlantic’s original story, which Kelly himself has confirmed.

Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed. 

So he called them losers and THEN suckers, got it? A totally different thing! And that wasn’t why Trump didn’t want to go to the cemetery, though Kessler doesn’t mention the actual reason from the story: “because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain.”

Trump claimed on Tuesday you can't walk across the street to get a loaf of bread without getting raped and shot, and we just did that and are still alive enough to be typing, somehow, where’s that fact check? Or maybe we aren’t alive, we are all just ghosts living in the Washington Post’s Sixth Sense.

The New York Times also ran a nitpicky fact-check, griping that things were taken out of context. Trump doesn’t want to cut Social Security or Medicare, it’s misleading to say so, because even though he DID say that once, he didn’t say “no takebacks” afterwards. Trump didn’t straight-out instruct people to inject bleach, he just called the idea “interesting.” Trump didn’t say “suckers and losers,” he said “losers” one time and “suckers” another, so CONTEXT NEEDED.

Here’s some context, people give these papers money in exchange for information! If that information no longer seems credible because a paper is so disgustingly balls-out in the bag for Trump that it feels gross to read it, why would anyone volunteer to pay them for such a service? What reliable sources are even left, and what remains of democracy with no sources that anyone can agree are reliable any more? Democracy dies in darkness, somebody said once. Context needed! It also dies under bright lights, from a chronic case of stupids.