Man oh man, our esteemed fAcT cHeCkErS are going to the mat to try and protect their boy Biden.
Biden this week committed an humiliating gaffe when he appeared to refer to baseball great Satchel Paige as the "great Negro" of his era in baseball:
Now, you can make the case, as some have, that Biden simply stumbled over the wording and meant to say something like "the great Negro League pitcher" or "the great pitcher in the Negro League." Maybe that's true and maybe it's not.
But man, the fact-checkers have absolutely gone to the mattress for Biden in order to protect him from the fallout over this. It would seem odd to perform a "fact check" on something such as this—at best it was a slip of the tongue, at worst a painfully dated turn of phrase—but let me tell you, those ol' checkers of facts are checking hard. Here's Reuters:
The clip shows Biden appearing to stumble over his words with the first mention of Paige, before going on to reference the Negro Leagues in the following phrase.
Oh good, glad that clears things up. Here's Snopes:
Based on the context of his remarks, it appears that Biden was going to describe Paige as "the great pitcher in the Negro Leagues," but the words that came out of his mouth were "I've adopted the attitude of the great Negro — at the time, pitcher in the Negro Leagues — went on to become a great pitcher in the pros…"
Thank you, Snopes, for that "fact check" that clarifies what it "appeared that Biden was going to describe" based on "the context of his remarks." You can't get any more 100% fact-based than that!
Biden was in the process of describing Paige as a great Negro Leagues pitcher, but stumbled with his words and initially stopped at the word "Negro."
Wow, that's a pretty presumptive fact check. Did PolitiFact have access to the president's prepared remarks of that day? If they did, they're not sharing it.
Well, good thing all of those fact-checkers cleared everything up. Honestly, it's quite uncomfortable seeing these media brands crying so hard over Biden's uncomfortable gaffe about a famous baseball player. It's not professional, and anyway, as the old saying goes...
