WaPo Hack Tries Covering for Biden, Her Own Paper's Reporting Shows She's Wrong
When a Washington Post columnist’s point is undermined by her own newspaper’s reporting, you better believe the mendacity is pretty thick.
Post writer Jennifer Rubin, for the unfamiliar, is the newspaper’s primary beneficiary of the “seriously-guys-I’m-really-a-conservative” fake Republican scholarship program every liberal media outlet runs.
You know the gig: There are always hired hacks who will recapitulate the same warmed-over Democratic talking points and shower adoration on the same politicians the left has fallen in love with — and then they’ll insist they’re still GOP diehards, that it’s just that all the conservative crazies have driven them to embrace the left and any patriot of sound mind would do exactly the same thing they’re doing
Rubin doesn’t have quite the media presence as others running this grift — David Brooks for The New York Times and Ana Navarro on CNN, for instance — but what she lacks in fame she makes up for in dedication to The Cause. Any American who remains a member of the Republican Party, she claims, simply cannot be reasoned with. (A February Rubin column: “Sane Republicans need to leave the GOP.”)
There’s nary a single point in her work that deviates significantly from the positions of President Joe Biden’s administration. This is true even though her own Washington Post, of all outlets, isn’t co-signing the White House’s fallacious claims.
On Sunday, Rubin published a column titled, “Hey, whatever happened to the border crisis?” Here’s the condensed version: It’s gone away because the Biden administration is handling the situation “competently and compassionately” and Republicans “have lost interest in the subject,” instead moving “onto imaginary hamburger bans, phony accusations that [Vice President Kamala] Harris’s book is getting distributed at detention centers and, sadly, discouraging people from getting vaccinations.”
On the second point — that Republicans have allegedly “lost interest” in a national crisis — you could build an 80-foot scarecrow in a field next to a print-out of Rubin’s column and it would still be the second biggest straw-man in the pasture. On the first point, however, Rubin relied, in part, on a credulous reading of the Biden administration’s own talking points regarding the border crisis.
“The administration was caught flat-footed by the issue, but it made clear that the number of arrivals kept pace with the usual seasonal trends plus some pent-up demand to leave Central America due to two hurricanes and the pandemic,” Rubin wrote. “Biden officials vowed to get things under control.”
This dubious explication of the border crisis was most prominently thrown out during the president’s first news conference on March 25, when he was asked by PBS’ Yamiche Alcindor whether “the perception of you that got you elected as a moral, decent man is the reason why a lot of immigrants are coming to this country and entrusting you with unaccompanied minors.”
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“Truth of the matter is, nothing has changed. As many people came, a 28 percent increase in children to the border in my administration, 31 percent in the last year, in 2019, before the pandemic in the Trump administration. It happens every single solitary year,” Biden responded.
“There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. It happens every year. In addition to that, there is a — and by the way, does anybody suggest that there was a 31 percent increase under Trump because he was a nice guy and he was doing good things at the border?” Biden continued. “That’s not the reason they’re coming. The reason they’re coming is that it’s the time they can travel with the least likelihood of dying on the way because of the heat in the desert.”
Whoever came up with that one deserves a nomination for spin-job of the year, but even a desultory look at the numbers reveals that it’s false. Don’t just take my word for it, though: Take The Washington Post’s. As Peter J. Hasson of Fox News pointed out, The Post had already debunked this claim.
Left: WaPo columnist @JRubinBlogger claims Biden admin “made clear” that border crisis was largely “seasonal”
Right: WaPo border reporter @NickMiroff notes that the seasonal claim is false pic.twitter.com/htjQeBk1fb
— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) May 3, 2021
In an April 27 timeline of the border crisis, The Post’s Nick Miroff pointed out that “Biden falsely described the increase as a seasonal norm, not a result of his policies or approach.”
There was, in fact, no consistent seasonal fluctuation in numbers at any time in recent history that could justify that claim — but it sounded nice to Biden’s cheerleaders, so they went along with it.
It’s worth noting, too, that Miroff’s debunking of the Democratic claim Rubin adopted went further than that.
Instead of Biden’s administration getting the border crisis under control by dealing with the problem “competently and compassionately,” much of the credit can be given to Mexico, which has tightened the spigot on illegal migration, he wrote.
“As Biden officials pledged to reduce border pressures by addressing the ‘root causes’ of migration from Central America, they worked behind the scenes to get Mexico to stiffen enforcement,” Miroff wrote. “Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador agreed to deploy more police and soldiers near the country’s border with Guatemala, and the United States pledged to ship him millions of doses of surplus coronavirus vaccines.”
That looks a lot like a quid pro quo vaccines-for-enforcement deal. Competent, perhaps, but there aren’t many on the left who are going to believe that’s a move dripping with the milk of human compassion.
Rubin’s column also puts a happy face on some of the uncomfortable facts Miroff’s timeline of the border crisis doesn’t sugarcoat.
Rubin: “The number of migrants is still at historic highs, but so long as these children are processed swiftly and humanely and given a chance at a far better life than what they fled, is it a ‘crisis’? Think of it this way: Instead of saying: ‘In March, the Border Patrol apprehended 18,663 unaccompanied minors at the US-Mexico border, up from the previous month, according to the agency’s data,’ it would be more accurate to say, ‘In March, the Border Patrol rescued 18,663 unaccompanied minors fleeing life-threatening conditions, the overwhelming majority of whom were quickly processed and placed in appropriate settings.’”
Miroff: “The Biden administration now has more than 21,000 teens and children in [Health and Human Services] shelters — a record — plus another 1,700 in Border Patrol stations and facilities. Although the administration is quickly growing its number of shelter beds, it lacks enough child-care providers to supervise them and case workers to screen their family members to determine their eligibility to take custody.”
If The Washington Post is going to give Rubin that ex-Republican scholarship, the least she can do is read her own bloody paper in return.
Even The Post admits Biden’s excuse about seasonal fluctuations is hooey and the fast and humane processing of unaccompanied minors is a myth. Furthermore, the only reason the border crisis has “gone away” is because it’s been normalized by outlets like Rubin’s own. The paper’s editors can’t quite bring themselves to pretend the president is doing as much of a bang-up job as Rubin can, however. Given the liberal proclivities of The Washington Post, that says a lot.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
