Miranda Devine mdevine@nypost.com WH lies a matter of life & death
PRESIDENT Biden has gotten away his entire career with bending the truth and taking people for fools. Now the habit has infected his entire administration.
So many lies are pumped out these days that it is impossible to keep up.
They aren’t just the silly, self-aggrandizing exaggerations that used to send the Trump-hating media into paroxysms of outrage during the last administration.
They often are matters of life and death that have a profound impact on the future of this country.
Lie 1: The southern border is closed.
No, it’s wide open, by design, and yet Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Vice President Kamala Harris keep telling us “The border is closed.”
We can see with our own eyes, mainly thanks to Fox News, that illegal immigrants from all over the world are flooding in from Mexico, under the watchful gaze of Border Patrol agents who have been ordered to stand down.
“The borders are not open,” Mayorkas said last week. “If you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned. Your journey will not succeed.”
Oh yeah, Pinocchio?
After a week of stonewalling by DHS and the White House press office, Mayorkas admitted to Fox News on Sunday that most of the 17,400 illegal immigrants who were cleared out from under the Del Rio bridge in Texas will stay in America.
He said 10,000 to 12,000 already have been released into the US to melt into the shadows, and another 5,000 are currently being processed by DHS, some of whom also will be released.
So that is an 80 percent to 97 percent success rate for the first 12,400 — good odds for the golden ticket of living in America.
Mayorkas is facilitating what can only be seen as a deliberate invasion. His job is to expedite the secret movement of migrants out of sight and out of mind.
In Orwellian fashion, he covers up this defiance of the law by changing the language: “We don’t use the term illegal immigrants,” he told CNN on Sunday. “I actually issued a policy . . . we use the term noncitizen.”
Lie 2: Border Patrol agents on horseback “whipped” Haitian migrants.
After trying to stop Fox News’ drone from filming the makeshift refugee camp under the Del Rio bridge, the Biden administration realized it had an optics problem.
So Border Patrol was given permission to stop the flood of migrants who were crossing the Rio Grande.
They used horses as crowd control on the rocky riverbank. If they had not done so it is unlikely Mayorkas would have been able to clear the migrant camp by Friday, as Biden had instructed.
Twitter activists seized on an image of the operation to falsely accuse the agents of strapping the migrants with horse whips. What they said were whips were reins.
The administration’s rush to judgment was shameful. The agents were taken off active duty pending an investigation and horse patrols were suspended, thus removing one of the last remaining tools to secure the border.
The VP likened the agents’ actions to “the worst moments of our history . . . during times of slavery.” Mayorkas implied they were racist.
The president piled on, using all the authority of his office to threaten the agents with dire consequences for merely doing their jobs.
“It was horrible to see what you saw, to see people treated like they did,” Biden said. “Horses running them over, people being strapped.
It’s outrageous. I promise you those people will pay.”
Mayorkas denied that the president’s false and inflammatory claim that migrants were “strapped” would influence the investigation of the horseback agents.
But when he was asked at Friday’s White House press briefing about the use of “horse whips,” he called it “horrifying” and did not even attempt to correct the reporter’s erroneous description of reins.
Lie 3: We will not leave Afghanistan until every American is evacuated.
So said Joe Biden 13 days before his self-imposed deadline of Aug. 31.
“If there’s American citizens left, we’re gonna stay to get them all out,” he told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos.
At least 100 Americans were abandoned, along with many more Afghan allies, and now the FBI is reportedly paying visits to the homes of veterans who are trying to keep the president’s word for him.
Lie 4: The drone attack on Aug. 29 in Kabul was a “righteous strike” on ISIS-K terrorists.
Wrong. Ten innocent civilians, including seven children, were killed.
The Pentagon lied and obfuscated for two weeks and only came clean after The New York Times published incontrovertible video footage and eyewitness reporting of the tragic reality.
We still haven’t been told the identities of the victims of an earlier drone strike on Aug. 27. We are supposed to accept the word of the Pentagon that bad guys were killed, just as we are supposed to believe Biden when he tells us the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan was an “extraordinary success.”
Lie 5: Hunter Biden’s laptop is “Russian disinformation.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki was at it again on Friday with this cock and bull story.
Asked by Fox News’ Peter Doocy if the White House still stood by its claim that incriminating material on the president’s son’s abandoned laptop was planted by the Russians, Psaki maintained the fiction.
“I think it’s broadly known . . . that there was a broad range of Russian disinformation back in 2020.”
Accurate stories of Biden family wrongdoing based on files from the laptop — which The Post has been publishing consistently since October — never had anything to do with Russians. That was just the Biden campaign’s way of discrediting them, with the help of former CIA head John Brennan and 50 other shameful former intelligence operatives whose false claims of a Russian plot served as a fig leaf to censor and traduce The Post reporting.
Lie 6: The cost of the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion social welfare bill is “zero” dollars.
Biden said this on Friday, when talking about slaying imaginary “trillionaires” with a mystery-box bill no one has a clue about. “It is a zero price tag on the debt . . . It’s going to be zero, zero,” he said.
The math doesn’t need elaborating. $3.5 trillion is not zero.
With so many lies, is it any wonder that Biden’s approval level has plummeted from 61 percent in January to 37 percent in September, among independent voters, according to a Gallup poll.
Gaslighting only goes so far. This is a lesson many a politician has learned the hard way. Underestimate the intelligence of the electorate at your peril.