Dems Shocked to Learn Manchin, Sinema Not the Only Americans Opposed to ‘Build Back Better’ Agenda

Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we dissect Democrats’ attacks against their own, review CNN’s embarrassing attempts to suppress the concerns of parents in Virginia, and hit more media misses.

Democrats Mislead on Support Behind Massive Spending

Democrats have continually painted senators Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.) as the two lone lawmakers who are obstructing the will of the Senate and the American people.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) tweeted last month: “2 senators cannot be allowed to defeat what 48 senators and 210 House members want.”

Meanwhile, Biden said at a CNN town hall that with the Senate being evenly divided, “You have 50 Democrats, every one is a president. Every single one. So, you got to work things out.”

Setting aside the fact that the “two senators ruining it for everyone” narrative was always a false premise — it is actually 52 senators who oppose Biden’s attempted spending spree — a new ABC News/IPSOS poll revealed this week that many Americans are not so keen on Democrats’ spending binge after all.

Just 25 percent of Americans believe the massive social-spending package and the bipartisan infrastructure bill would help them if they became law, while 32 percent believe the spending bills would hurt people like them, the poll found. Nearly 18 percent think the bills would make no difference.

The initial proposal for the reconciliation bill was estimated to cost $3.5 trillion but has since been reduced to $1.75 trillion.The new reconciliation bill framework includes universal preschool, tax credits and investments for clean-energy infrastructure, a one-year extension of the current expanded child tax credit, and a provision allowing Medicare to cover hearing services. Several measures were dropped from the new framework, such as free community college, Medicare coverage for vision and dental services, and paid family leave.

The infrastructure bill calls for $550 billion in new spending over the next five years on railways and public transit, rebuilding the electric power grid, and expanding broadband Internet access.

Even among Democrats alone, just 47 percent think the two bills would help people like them, while a quarter of Democrats said the bills will make no difference for people like them. Twenty-two percent said they didn’t know how it would impact their lives. Sixty-four percent of Republicans said they think the bills would hurt people like them; 29 percent of independents said the same.

As NR’s Charlie Cooke wrote over the weekend, “This is what Joe Manchin is violating his own standards for? This is what Democratic moderates in the House and the Senate are choosing to commit suicide over? This is the cause of our months-long Washington drama?”

CNN Anchors Trip over Themselves to Defend McAuliffe

Last week, both Jake Tapper and Chris Cuomo twisted truths to bolster Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for Virginia governor.

Tapper presented misleading talking points promoted by McAuliffe as truths when he did a segment on a recent ad released by Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate. Youngkin’s ad draws attention to McAuliffe’s decision to veto a bill during his time as Virginia governor that would have mandated that schools notify parents when instructional materials featuring explicit sexual material were to be used in the classroom. If a parent did not wish for their child to be exposed to the material, the bill mandated that “nonexplicit instructional material and related academic activities” be provided to the student.

The ad features Laura Murphy, a parent whose son’s experience with Toni Morrison’s Beloved during McAuliffe’s first term as governor led to the passage of the aforementioned legislation. The book, which is set in the pre–Civil War South and depicts the horrors of slavery, includes violent, sexually explicit content, including graphic descriptions of rape.

However, while the ad does not specifically mention the book nor the topic of race, McAuliffe’s campaign has dismissed the ad as a “racist dogwhistle,” and has claimed that Youngkin supports “book bans.” However, the bill in question, which was supported by 18 Democrats, and 14 members of the Black Legislative Caucus in the Virginia General Assembly, did not ban books of any kind.

These facts did nothing to dissuade Tapper or CNN political reporter Eva McKend from aiding McAuliffe in his deceitful aims in the aforementioned segment, titled “GOP candidate’s new ad targets iconic book. Hear what he left out.”

“Now what Murphy and Glenn Youngkin don’t tell you in that ad is that her son was a high school senior and the book that she wanted banned was Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Beloved,” Tapper says.

McKend then says Youngkin’s campaign rallies were filled with “parents and grandparents that are ticked off at their local school boards” who “don’t like how the history of racism and the impact of racism is taught in Virginia public schools.”

The entire segment is constructed such that viewers are left with three distinct, but manifestly false, impressions: That Youngkin supports book “bans,” that the ad was a “dog whistle” about the intersection of education and race, and that it is somehow representative of the Republican nominee’s broader position on the question of how the history of racism should be taught.

Meanwhile, Cuomo aired a similarly off-base segment the same day in which he then said Beloved, a controversial-yet-award-winning novel that contains graphic depictions of sex, violence and bestiality while describing the horrors of slavery, is considered “one of the greatest novels in American history” before condemning the concerned mom.

“Her son was assigned to read it in an advanced placement English course, it’s college level. Smart kid. The parent? Maybe not so much,” Cuomo said.

See more

Fredo attacks the intelligence of a concerned mom in a Youngkin campaign ad. “Her son was assigned to read [“Beloved”] in an advanced placement English course. It’s college-level. Smart kid. The parent, maybe not so much.” This, from the guy who failed a mental acuity test. pic.twitter.com/WxTSy1W7Ze

— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) October 27, 2021

“You can dismiss the absurdity of this, right? What is this, like ‘Fahrenheit 451?’ No. This is modern day, and it is messaging that may work,” Cuomo said.

“You will likely see these kinds of scare tactics – government, the Democrats, they’re the same thing, and they want to ruin the way you live. Testing, masks, vaccine, now your kids in school, critical race theory, whatever that is,” Cuomo said.

Headline Fail of the Week

Jezebel counters Dave Chappelle’s assertion that progressive comedienne Hannah Gadsby is “not funny” with an all-timer: “Dave Chappelle Says Hannah Gadsby Is ‘Not Funny.’ The Laughter At Her Show Taping Suggests Otherwise.” Inside the article, Emily Alford writes, convincingly, “I was at the Netflix taping  of Gadsby’s Douglas, and I not only saw people laughing, but I also laughed myself.”

I think the author may have missed the point. The ultimate target of the joke was not Gadsby herself, but her self-parodical fans.

Media Misses

• Omri Ceren, national-security adviser to Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas), recalled a miss by Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler in a tweet on Saturday, sharing a screenshot of a May 2020 tweet in which Kessler accuses Cruz of missing a scientific animation in a video that he shared that he says “shows how it is virtually impossible for this virus to jump from the lab.” He adds that interviews with actual scientists reach the same conclusion and that the Washington Post “deals in facts, and viewers can judge for themselves.”

Ceren shares a screen grab of a recent Financial Times article that says a new U.S. intelligence report reveals that COVID-19 most likely began with a Wuhan lab accident.

See more

Fact checkers you guys. I just don’t know. pic.twitter.com/gzFZbDCPoW

— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) October 30, 2021

•  AV Club published a column by writer Matt Schimkowitz claiming that Senators Mitt Romney and Kyrsten Sinema are “two of America’s worst people.” Writing about the pair’s Ted Lasso Halloween costumes, he says: “Great, you watched a TV. How very human of you. Even worse, weaponizing a show that focuses its emotional core on empathy for the political gains of two people that are currently making everyone’s lives worse is a real slap in the face. To put it more elegantly, this sucks.”

NR’s Jim Geraghty had a tongue-in-cheek response to the column, writing in a tweet: ”For perspective on who might be a worse person, there were 4,901 homicides committed in the United States in 2020.”

• CNN commentator Asha Rangappa caused social-media users to scratch their heads over the weekend when she disingenuously drew a comparison between the phrase “Let’s go, Brandon” — which has become a meme for saying F*** Joe Biden” — to pledging one’s allegiance to the Islamic State.

“As an experiment, I’d love for an @SouthwestAir pilot to say “Long live ISIS” before taking off. My guess is that 1) the plane would be immediately grounded; 2) the pilot fired; and 3) a statement issued by the airline within a matter of hours,” she tweeted following reports that Southwest Airlines had launched an internal investigation into a pilot who allegedly signed off from a flight with the phrase, “Let’s go, Brandon.”

After several users pointed out the false equivalency Rangappa had crafted, the CNN commentator doubled down: ”ISIS didn’t run planes into buildings. They didn’t exist in 2001. MAGA did attack the Capitol, attempt to overthrow the government of the United Stares, and threaten to hang the Vice President. So.”

See more

ISIS didn’t run planes into buildings. They didn’t exist in 2001. MAGA did attack the Capitol, attempt to overthrow the government of the United Stares, and threaten to hang the Vice President. So. https://t.co/1C6fZENGOD

— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) October 31, 2021