Topic: CNSNews.com
In addition to its highly biased "news" coverage of President Biden's State of the Union address, CNSNews.com served up some highly biased opinion pieces about it. A Feb. 8 piece by the Heritage Foundation's Jarrett Stepman purported to fact-check a Biden statement:
In his second State of the Union address, President Joe Biden spoke Tuesday night about inflation, which has risen steeply during his presidency.
“Inflation has been a global problem because of the pandemic that disrupted supply chains and Putin’s war that disrupted energy and food supplies,” Biden said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine.
Although it’s true that inflation has hit other nations’ economies, it did not start in the U.S. at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, nor did it begin during Russia’s war on Ukraine. The president’s description of the inflation problem is misleading at best.
Stepman offered no evidence that a specific Biden policy was directly tied to a specific increase in inflation. EJ Antoni, also of Heritage, similarly complained:
For starters, Biden has frequently said that inflation was out of control when he became president, going so far as to say it was one of the reasons he ran for office. But inflation averaged less than 2% during the primary campaign and averaged closer to 1% during the general election campaign. When Biden took office, annual inflation was a mere 1.4%.
Fast-forward a year and a half, and inflation was 1.3%—for a single month.
Prices were rising about as fast in one month as they did in the entire year before Biden took office. The annual inflation rate broke 9% for the first time in four decades.
He too failed to offer evidence that directly links specific Bidenpolicies to specific increases in inflation.
Hans Bader groused that Biden said crime went down during the first year of the COVID pandemic when it actually went up, then rushed to blame the following crime surge on "massive anti-cop riots in cities across the country," not mention that 1) Biden was not president at the time, and 2) the incidents of police brutality, such as the death of George Floyd, that sparked those "anti-cop riots."
Linnea Lueken whined in what read like a press release from the oil industry:
For the sake of my blood pressure and mental health, I did not watch the entire State of the Union Address this year. I did, however, take a look at President Biden’s statements on climate change and energy. Unsurprisingly, Biden’s commentary on those topics was not overly insightful or nuanced.
Biden opined on how climate change is causing more extreme weather events (it’s not), he slammed oil companies for daring to make profits when oil prices skyrocketed last year, and then he went off script and admitted that we still need oil for the next few decades, at least.
Lueken is a researcher with the right-wing Heartland Institute's Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy. If that name sounds familiar, it should: Art Robinson is the perpetually failed candidate for a congressional seat in Oregon who is a favorite of WorldNetDaily for a bogus petition denying climate change and developing a homeschool curriculum built in part around a series of century-old adventure books for children whose racial insensitivity and old-school imperialism hasn't exactly held up well.
Yet another Heritage writer, Peter Brookes, grumbled that "Biden made no mention of nuclear proliferation problems Tuesday night in his State of the Union address. Could the issue of nuclear weapons have slipped his mind?"
A different right-wing think-tanker, Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution, spent his Feb. 10 column ranting at Biden:
Biden simply did on Tuesday in his State of the Union address what he always does: misinform, ignore, and attack!
Misinform. After sending inflation, energy, and interest rates to astronomical rates, and then seeing them momentarily taper off a bit, Biden declares that he “lowered” these indices that remain far higher than they were when he entered office.
He brags of a low unemployment rate. But Biden never discloses the better indicator of the labor participation rate that has declined under his tenure—or the fact he inherited a growing economy naturally rebounding on autopilot from a disastrous two-year COVID-19 lockdown.
Ignore. Consider what he will never mention. China just violated international law and U.S. airspace. How did Beijing assume rightly that it so easily could get away with it?
There is no southern border. Biden destroyed it. He greenlighted over 5 million illegal aliens to enter the United States without audit or legality—even as smuggled Mexican drugs kill 100,000 Americans each year.
[...]
He never mentions that Russia went into Ukraine because Russian President Vladimir Putin saw no downside after this debacle in Afghanistan, or that Biden’s own inept remarks about not worrying over a Russia invasion of Ukraine if it just proved to be “minor” probably played some role.
Attack! Remember Biden comes to life only when he smears his enemies while calling for “unity” and “bipartisanship.”
Only then his voice rises, his brow furrows, and his face reddens. He claims that “the rich” avoid “paying their fair share,” even as he knows that just 1% of the country pays over 40% of all income taxes.
[...]
In sum, it was the same old, same old dishonest Biden: misinform, ignore, and attack—and then call for “unity,” as the country collectively slides into ruin.
Craig Bannister devoted a Feb. 8 article to another right-wing ranter, Ben Shapiro, under the misleading headline "Ben Shapiro: ‘Last Night Was One of the Worst Events in American Life’." But the article itself makes it clear that Shapiro is raging about State of the Union addresses in general, not specifically Biden's.
