Washington Post "Fact Checker" Glenn Kessler huffed and puffed on Tuesday about "The misplaced outrage over Hunter Biden and U.S. oil reserves bought by China." One of the "liars" in this outrage was the Washington Free Beacon. In an editorial titled Fact Checking's Final Frontier, they replied "We at the Washington Free Beacon love the fact-checkers. When they’re 'fact-checking' us, we know we must be doing something right."
They called Kessler's article "a master class in the left’s crusade to conflate objective truth with Democratic spin."
Kessler didn't find anything in the Free Beacon's reporting that was a lie. It's just that "simple facts" were turned "nefarious." He didn't like the impression they were pushing:
This is an example of how simple facts — SPR oil was sold to a subsidiary of a Chinese company and Hunter Biden once has a business relationship with that company — are turned into something nefarious. The contract was awarded to the highest bidders in a competitively bid process and Hunter Biden was many steps removed from the U.S. trading arm of the Chinese firm.
Moreover, there’s no reason for outrage. Oil prices are determined by global supply and demand. The Biden administration is seeking to lower the global price of crude oil by bolstering supply around the globe. Selling crude oil to traders, whether based in the United States, Europe or Asia, is part of that effort.
Anyone who suggests the Biden administration is doing something wrong here — as opposed to following the rules — earns Three Pinocchios.
Anyone who suggested Team Biden looks bad earns Pinocchios. Any outrage about the Bidens is "misplaced outrage." That's an interesting way of "fact checking." You can't say using the "Strategic Petroleum Reserve" to sell oil to our biggest geopolitical adversary is....not strategic. Kessler & Co. have a bad habit of absolving the Biden team on energy policy.
The Free Beacon noted Biden adviser Ian Sams was happily waving Kessler’s assessment around on Twitter, accusing Republicans of "pushing false conspiracies about the President." This prompted their conclusion:
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.
