It will be hard for the WaPo "fact checker" to give 4 Pinocchios to Joe Biden. He has to back off one Pinocchio because... well, why exactly?

Here's Biden repeatedly asserting that "he's traveled 17,000 miles with Xi Jingping": 

 

Biden is making a lot of misstatements of fact. The WaPo fact checker, Glenn Kessler, writes:

During his recent town hall on CNN, President Biden made a number of mistaken claims and assertions. He suggested racehorse owners receive tax breaks worth $9 billion, almost enough to pay for free attendance at community college — a claim that left tax experts scratching their heads. He said that the $7.25 minimum wage set in 2009 would be worth $20 if indexed for inflation, a statement that only makes sense if you are measuring from 1968. He wrongly stated that “vast majority” of undocumented immigrants were not Hispanic.

No Pinocchios assigned for any of that. It's all so obviously wrong that maybe it's not worth bothering to investigate. But Kessler's approach in these columns is, I think, to isolate one thing and figure out where it stands on the continuum from utter truth to bald-faced lie. Here, he's chosen the 17,000 with Xi Jingping assertion. 

The first time Kessler heard it, he says, it "seemed like a typical Biden malaprop." See? Biden gets graded on a curve. Unlike Trump, whose misstatements were judged against a stereotype that he's a huge liar, Biden gets the benefit of a presumption that he's always getting words wrong — as though it's some sort of disability, like his stuttering, and we ought to be charitable.

But Biden has repeated the assertion, as you see in the video clip, so the standard charitable allowance for the idiosyncrasies of the Biden brain was hard to use, and the fact checker has to fact-check at least some of the new President's statements. The feast on Trump is over, and the fact-checking enterprise must go on or at least seem to go on.

Here's Kessler:

[Biden has had] certainly an impressive amount of face time with Xi. But Biden’s mileage number has kept us puzzling till our puzzler was sore....

Notice the interposition of a phrase from a children's book. ("And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled 'till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before.") 

Were Kessler's fact checks of Trump's misstatements ever leavened with cutesy phrases like that? 

Kessler figures out that Biden is saying he's traveled "with Xi Jingping" when he was traveling without Xi Jingping but on his way to or from visits with Xi:

A White House official conceded that Biden’s line of “traveling with” Xi is not accurate. “This was a reference to the total travel back and forth — both internally in the U.S. and China, and as well as internationally — for meetings they held together,” he said. “Some travel was in parallel, some was separately to joint destinations.” 

But even using that ridiculous way of counting the traveling together, Kessler "still could not get the travel to add up to 17,000 miles." There are a few different ways to put the numbers together, but Kessler arrives at the options 3,300, 5,600, and 28,000. It's never 17,000. Kessler talked to a White House official and sought help with puzzling out some way to get to the magic number of 17,000, but he came up empty. And Biden repeats this number that's just obviously wrong. He must know it is wrong! So how many Pinocchios?

[Biden's] broader point is undisputed — that he’s already spent an unusually large amount of time with Xi for someone who is just now taking office. So Biden’s claim is not completely from whole cloth. He did meet Xi in various cities in China and United States, in some cases traveling substantial distances. But numbers are numbers. Biden is using a figure that cannot be verified in a misleading way. He correctly notes he spent hours in private talks with Xi, including outside the capital cities, on different occasions. Those are substantial bragging rights — which makes his apparent need to gild the lily with an invented figure so puzzling. 

The president earns Three Pinocchios.

So Kessler's puzzler is still sore. Me, I'm trying to puzzle out why that gets 3 and not 4. According to WaPo's explanation of its Pinocchio rating, 3 is supposed to mean "Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.... 'mostly false'... [or] statements which are technically correct... but are so taken out of context as to be very misleading." The number is just plain wrong, not partly wrong. There's no explanation and the White House was asked for an explanation. It's a number. Nothing adds up even close to it, even when you use a ludicrous definition of what it means to travel "with" somebody!

Stop babying Biden! He's the damned President. If he needs to be babied, get him out of the presidency.

***

A footnote about malapropisms, from the Wikipedia article, "Malapropism": 

[P]hilosopher Donald Davidson suggests that malapropisms reveal something about how people process the meanings of words. He argues that language competence must not simply involve learning a set meaning for each word, and then rigidly applying those semantic rules to decode other people's utterances. Rather, he says, people must also be continually making use of other contextual information to interpret the meaning of utterances, and then modifying their understanding of each word's meaning based on those interpretations.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bob Boyd said:

Biden having already spent a lot of time with Xi is a good thing, but Trump having any communication at all with Putin, or even mentioning Putin, was portrayed as evidence Putin owned and controlled Trump. And this in spite of the fact that Biden has been credibly accused of having been paid off by Xi whereas Trump's ties to Putin were exhaustively investigated and nothing improper was found. They aren't babying Biden. They're publishing propaganda.

I don't know about those accusations, but even assuming they're untrue, I would think that Biden's extensive time with Xi puts Xi at an advantage. Which man do you think is more able to gather useful knowledge of the weaknesses of the other? It's got to be Xi.

ADDED: I asked "Were Kessler's fact checks of Trump's misstatements ever leavened with cutesy phrases like that?" Glenn Kessler emails and points to an August 4, 2016 fact check of Trump that began "We have puzzled and puzzled over these remarks until our puzzler was sore" — the very same literary reference (to Dr. Seuss). 

Here: "Trump’s absurd charge that Clinton raised $60 million in July from just 20 people." By the way, Trump got 4 Pinocchios for that. The explanation for the rating is: 

There’s a huge difference between 900,000 and 20. In an effort to spin a narrative that Clinton is controlled by a small group of donors, Trump relies on innuendo and fantasy math. In reality, Clinton raised her campaign cash in July from a substantial base of small donors.

As with Biden's 17,000 miles, you've got a specific number and it's just wrong, but there's a rather absurd effort to explain it — "innuendo and fantasy math." If Trump deserved 4 Pinocchios for that, then why not Biden?