A media stupid season

It’s media stupid season. I know it’s hard to tell when it seems like every day is the same, but the last eight weeks of a close campaign are, I assure you, the dumbest.

This week alone we’ve seen PolitiFact’s chief correspondent “fact-check” former President Donald Trump for saying Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine had Trump still been in office.

Now, this is a campaign-trail claim for sure, though there’s some merit to it. Russia invaded countries on every 21st-century president’s watch but Trump’s (Bush got Georgia, Obama got Ukraine, and Biden got Ukraine again). Further, the 45th president earned and cultivated a reputation for unpredictably sudden and vicious reprisals when crossed (Soleimani, Syria, MOAB, etc.).

All that’s to say it’s incredibly difficult to “fact-check” a political claim about what might have been. It’s the sort of thing that is solidly within politicians’ right to claim and solidly within voters’ rights to judge, but decidedly not in “fact-checkers’” lane to “check.” Thank God our chief correspondent was there, however! He called a half-retired professor at Columbia and another guy at place called Muskingum University and checked it anyway. “Experts,” our erstwhile reporter reported, “say presidents are hard-pressed to stop wars on their own.”

Fact-checkers' authority doesn’t exist, but it sells and, more importantly, is deeply important to the Democratic Party, Democrat-aligned media, and to Big Tech.

They weren’t done there, however. Trump also called Vice President Kamala Harris “Comrade Kamala.” It’s a little alliteration, because it’s two “kah” sounds, and it’s also a political insult for a woman whose very, very, very few economic policy pronouncements included floating price-controls. “When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’” one Washington Post columnist suggested, “maybe don’t propose price controls?”

But PolitiFact senior correspondent Amy Sherman was on the case. She fact-checked Trump’s crack as “pants-on-fire" — or as false as possible. Her “proposal is vague,” she wrote, “but its scope falls far short of communist policy ...”

“Her issue portfolio consists of mainstream left-of-center views,” she continued, “and would be uncontroversial even among right-of-center parties in Europe.”

This is a favorite issue for Amy, who the day before fact-checked Trump for calling Harris a Marxist, comparing the political rhetoric to former Sen. Joseph McCarthy (gasp!).

I couldn’t find a single instance of Amy or her employer fact-checking Democrats and their media friends’ near-ceaseless claims that Trump is a “fascist” or “an enemy of democracy.” They don’t seem to bother them.

That’s not surprising, of course. Fact-checking is a scam to assert some kind of special claim to objective authority. This authority doesn’t exist, of course, but it sells and, more importantly, is deeply important to the Democratic Party, Democrat-aligned media, and to Big Tech, which uses these fact-checks to censor everything from obviously false memes to legitimate political opposition.

Still, from time to time it can be so stupid it’s funny. This is one of those times. It’s 2024, once again Donald Trump is running for president, and this time, he’s neck and neck with the Democrats (even after they switched out their nominee). In their panic, they’re getting the whole gang back together. Russia is back in the news, which is darkly funny when you consider PolitiFact is accusing Trump of “McCarthyism.” Hell, they even rehired Brian Stelter at CNN.

It’s the last eight weeks of the election. Might as well try anything.

Bedford: The corporate takeover of ‘fact-checking’

Bedford: USA Today now using college kids to censor media they dislike

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IN OTHER NEWS

Hunter is guilty, but he also didn't do it; OK, fine, he did.

When we woke up Thursday morning, President Joe Biden’s 54-year-old man-child was preparing to plead innocent for dodging $1.4 million in taxes. The feds said he spent all that money on hookers, blow, and worse, and in his defense, he was planning to claim he was a little too drunk to pay those taxes.

It would have been a wonderful precedent to set, and I was truly looking forward to making the claim myself next year, but alas, our hero wilted as the reality of jury selection kicked off. So he tried the old Alford plea, which means you accept the whole guilty thing because you’ve got no real defense, but you still maintain that purity of an innocent heart.

Special counsel David Weiss wasn’t buying that. He’s received a lot of well-deserved criticism from our friends on the right, but I think sometimes they’ve misread his motives: He isn't furthering Democratic causes but rather covering his own butt. And Hunter’s gotten him in enough trouble already.

So anyway, the judge agreed with Weiss and told the boy wonder to try again. And now he's just plain guilty and is facing up to 17 years in prison and a $1.35 million fine. Don’t hold your breath that he’ll catch that. And honestly, prepare for Joe to pardon him. He’s promised not to, but the old man doesn’t owe anybody anything any more, so why wouldn’t he?

The fire rises: Politico: ‘Ticking time bomb’: Plunging office values alarm Washington

D.C. stopped going to work around St. Patrick’s Day 2020, and a lot of people never returned. In their absence, the mayor decided to own Trump by effectively stopping policing and turning her now-abandoned downtown over to Black Lives Matter activists, criminals, and the criminally insane. Now, the whole city economy is set to collapse. Katy O'Donnell reports:

Four and a half years after the pandemic sent workers home, the office property bill is finally coming due.

The market for office buildings — already reeling from higher vacancy rates amid the rise in remote-work policies — has been crushed by high borrowing costs, and while the Federal Reserve is at last preparing to cut interest rates, it may be too little, too late. Investors, banks and property owners are now beginning to accept that some commercial buildings will never recover their pre-pandemic value, and that’s leading to a steady drumbeat of distressed sales.

The market’s troubles have caught the attention of Congress — with one New York lawmaker calling it a “ticking time bomb” for banks as nearly $1 trillion in commercial real estate loans are coming due this year. Faced with vacant office buildings and a shortage of millions of homes to meet demand, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is trying to make it easier for developers to convert underused properties into housing.