Wednesday, August 16, 2023

‘Fact Checkers’ Nowhere to Be Found After Biden Tells Whopper on Pittsburgh Bridge Collapse


Sister Toldjah reporting for RedState 

As RedState reported earlier, Joe Biden was - as per the norm - an incoherent mess during a "Bidenomics" speech he gave Tuesday in Milwaukee, getting confused along the way, doing some creepy whispering, and telling several debunked falsehoods for good measure because of course, he did.

One, as Bonchie noted, was the fake story Biden has repeated often of the Amtrak conductor who allegedly told him during his time as Vice President that he had millions of travel miles on Air Force 2 and Amtrak.  As RedState noted before, however, there is no way that story could have been true. 

Another one that fact-checkers should be all over but predictably aren't as of this writing was related to the January 2022 Pittsburgh bridge collapse.  As many RedState readers remember, Biden had traveled to Pittsburgh that day to promote infrastructure projects and the so-called "Build Back Better" package.  

Several hours prior to his arrival was when the Fern Hollow Bridge collapsed, injuring ten people.  Biden visited the site during the course of his trip, but to repeat, he was not there when the collapse happened.

While that's what actually happened, that's not the story Biden told in Milwaukee.

“By the way, Pittsburgh is the city of bridges. More bridges in Pittsburgh than in any other city in America," he told the audience during his speech.

"I watched that bridge collapse. I got there and saw it collapse with over 200 feet off the ground going over a valley. It collapsed,” Biden also proclaimed. “Thank God school was out.”

Watch:

Except what he left out in addition to the truth was that the bridge fell close to 6:45 that morning. Biden was not due to arrive until that afternoon. Here's NPR's report on what happened at the time:

At least 10 people were injured when a snow-covered bridge in Pittsburgh collapsed early Friday, just hours before President Biden was due to visit the city to highlight his push for infrastructure improvement.

Biden made a stop at the collapse site Friday afternoon. "I've been coming to Pittsburgh a long time," he said of the city with 446 bridges. "And we're going to fix them all," he said.

[...]

Port Authority spokesperson Adam Brandolph told NPR that the bus was "nearly at the East side of the bridge" when it began to collapse at around 6:45 a.m. Crews helped get the operator and two passengers off the bus, and none were injured.

As the Associated Press also reported at the time, Biden even struggled to see what little bit he could while he was at the site:

Standing before concrete barriers papered with yellow police tape, Biden craned his neck to look out over the gaping expanse left by the crumbled bridge, as the smell of gas from a nearby leak filled the air.

So, no Biden did not see the bridge collapse before his own eyes. He could barely even see what was left after the collapse happened.

This is of course not the first whopper Biden has told about tragic incidents in Pittsburgh.

In September 2021, during an address to the Jewish community, Biden claimed that he had visited the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh after the mass shooting that happened on October 27, 2018 where 11 people were murdered by a white nationalist nutjob.

The problem with Biden's story is that according to the synagogue's executive director, Biden had not visited - not before the mass shooting nor after:

“I remember spending time at the, you know, going to the, you know, the Tree of Life synagogue, speaking with them,” Biden said in a 16-minute virtual address ahead of the Jewish holidays Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Barb Feige, executive director of the Tree of Life, said that Biden did not visit the synagogue in the nearly three years since the anti-Semitic attack.

In a phone interview, Feige, executive director since July 2019, said firmly that “no” Biden didn’t visit, even before taking office when he had a lower public profile as a former vice president and then-Democratic presidential candidate.

As I've said before, I realize that there are very few politicians who haven’t either made up or embellished a story a time or two during their careers to try and make themselves more appealing to voters, but the fact that Joe Biden does this so often speaks to something far more problematic, and it's something so-called fact-checkers should be paying attention to but aren't because Orange Man Bad or something.