Looks like presidential fact checks are back on the mainstream media’s menu, boys! The New York Times got the ball rolling last week by reporting that Joe Biden often “fumbles” when speaking about … well, anything. CNN followed suit immediately with its own fact check about Biden’s claims on Social Security, and later expanded it into a nine-part comprehensive debunking of Biden’s midterm electoral pitch.

Not to be outdone in all of this sudden interest in presidential scrutiny, the Washington Post rolls out its newest measure of dishonesty — for Biden, anyway. Glenn Kessler dusts off the “bottomless Pinocchio” that he created for Donald Trump.

Like CNN, Kessler rounds up a few of Biden’s recent claims into the abyss:

President Biden is a self-described “gaffe machine.” That’s no excuse, of course, for a president making false or misleading statements. Readers have asked for fact checks of a variety of recent Biden statements, but none of them seemed big enough for a stand-alone fact check. So here’s a roundup of some of the president’s recent errors of fact, made as he has barnstormed the country boosting Democrats and raising contributions in advance of the midterm elections. We generally do not award Pinocchios for roundups like this — but for reasons that will become clear, we need to make an exception for the first one.

It’s an appropriate award for a bottomless demagogue. The more remarkable takeaway from this round-up is that it largely consists of warmed-over lies, with one notable exception. Kessler seems particularly provoked at Biden’s oft-repeated lie of having traveled extensively with Xi Jinping, but it’s the least substantive lie of the round-up. It’s also the most meaningless, especially to voters in this election and political environment.

Much more relevantly, Kessler pegs Biden’s lies about the price of gas. Biden has lied constantly on this issue, both on the price itself and especially on the reasons for it, but Kessler opts to skewer the easiest of those claims — that gas cost $5 a gallon when he took office:

Many readers complained about his comment, given that average gas prices were about $2.48 the week Biden took office, according to the Energy Information Administration. Soaring gas prices over the course of Biden’s presidency have been a drag on his approval ratings. (The White House in fact has preferred to refer the “most common price,” which comes from the GasBuddy app and tends to be lower than the average price because California, with its super-high gas prices, raises the average.)

Biden was basically correct on the “most common price” at the time he made this comment but appears to have misspoken about the price when he took office. Generally, his speeches have referenced prices over the summer, not when he took office, as that tells a better story. For instance, a few days later, on Oct. 31, Biden said: “In June, the average price — not the most common price, but the average price — nationwide was — was over $5 a gallon. Today, the average price for a gallon of gas is $3.76.”

Well, that’s also an honesty problem. Biden has spent much of this year claiming that presidents don’t control the price of gas, only to then take credit when the price drops. The $5 a gallon claim is a lie too, but maybe more evidence of Biden getting lost in his arguments. Everything Biden claims on energy has been lies, and a long series of them, especially when it comes to supposed price-gouging at gas stations, which is an astounding effort to demonize mainly small business owners for the outcomes that Biden’s energy policies create.

Kessler rightly shreds Biden for the same lies about the Social Security cost-of-living increase cited by both the NYT and CNN, which at least has the novelty of being a fresh lie. So too is Biden’s claim to have signed a bill from Congress on student-loan debt forgiveness, which is not only a new lie but arguably signs of dementia in play:

In describing his plan for student loan forgiveness, Biden oddly said he had “just signed a law” that was approved in Congress by “a vote or two.”

But he never presented such a proposal for Congress to consider.

Instead, Biden relied on new authority granted by the Justice Department — a fresh interpretation of a law passed almost two decades ago, the 2003 Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act, often dubbed the Heroes Act. In a legal opinion, the Justice Department concluded that the law authorizes the education secretary to relieve borrowers of the obligation to repay federal student loans. Thus, the president could announce a plan to cancel student loans.

Ahem. While Kessler’s correct in calling this a lie, he makes the mistake of swallowing the fabricated predicate used by the White House. The DoJ does not have “authority” to “grant” in the first place. The DoJ offered up a new interpretation of a two-decade-old law to suit Joe Biden’s purposes to claim that Congress granted him that authority, on the basis of no evidence at all.  It’s all a lie, especially the idea that the DoJ can grant any kind of authority at all.

Still, at least the Post, the NYT, and CNN are finally covering the bottomless depths of Biden’s demagoguery and dishonesty, even if they don’t have the scope of it yet. That’s a nice change from most of the last two years, when media fact-checkers seemed more interested in the Babylon Bee than the babbling buffoon in the White House. One has to wonder whether all of this sudden interest is in any way connected to the upcoming midterm humiliation Democrats appear to be about to receive — and whether it’s a signal to cull Biden from the 2024 herd immediately afterward.

We’ll see, because it’s not as if they have exhausted their opportunities to fact-check Biden. Jim Geraghty reminds us of that today in his review of Biden’s serial lies on the national debt:

On Saturday, Biden used another one of his well-worn recurring “misstatements” that are probably more accurately described as “lies”:

And we’re going to do this while reducing the federal deficit. You know, because of the help I had from the senators in the Democratic Congress, we literally cut the federal debt in half by $1.4 trillion — (applause) — $1.4 trillion just this year, and last year by $350 billion. And another $250 billion over the next decade.

Look, I don’t want to hear from the MAGA Republicans who blew up the debt.  We’re the ones bringing it down. They’d shot it up.  (Applause.)

And by such a massive reduction in debt, we’re able to help working- and middle-class families in America.

The debt, or the total amount the U.S. owes, has not gone down on Biden’s watch, much less been “literally cut in half,” as Biden claims. On January 2020, 2021, the total U.S. debt was $21.6 trillion. Today, the debt is $24.3 trillion. (All numbers are from the U.S. Department of the Treasury website, Debt to the Penny.) On Biden’s watch, in about a two-year span, the debt has increased by $2.7 trillion. …

But when the president claims to have cut a $20 trillion national debt in half when he’s done nothing of the sort, that’s the sort of thing that should get everyone left, right, and center to say, “Stop. Just stop. Stop BS-ing us, this isn’t a late-night hangout with your colleagues in the Senate, you’re not helping anyone when you just make up accomplishments like this.”

No one except the fact-checkers, that is. If they want to be helped.