M.L. Berg, Minot

Republicans have been making rather a point of fact-checking President Biden’s remarks of late. This is a welcome change from their refusal to undertake presidential fact checking during the previous administration. Fact checkers at the Washington Post have attributed over 30,500 misleading statements and falsehoods to the previous president during the course of his four-year administration.

(The exact number can be found on the Washington Post web site.)

Fact checking should be standard operating procedure for all of us, not a tactic to be employed after a change of administration.

Using it as a tactic, especially in the wake of the previous president’s record of over 30,500 misleading statements and falsehoods, makes recent Republican fact-checking efforts ring hollow, if not altogether hypocritical with a capital ‘H’.

It’s not always easy to get at the facts, and it might take years to do so.

We might even have to move some fact-checking over to our to-do-lists in certain, difficult cases. In the meantime, let’s employ fact-checking as a way to verify the information at hand. Let’s not employ it as a tactic in a game of partisan one-up-man-ship.