Checking the Checkers: "Border Czar"

Racket consults the experts. How many dunce caps does the "Border Czar" controversy earn?

Not the Border Czar Kamala Harris looks on as Joe Biden delivers remarks on Border Security, January 5, 2023

The “Border Czar” insanity has hit new depths. In the last 48 hours we’ve raced from denial to paradox, with head-scratching stops in between. In the first stage, “Kamala Harris Wasn’t a Border Czar” became “Kamala Harris Wasn’t a Bad Border Czar.” This is from the new Reuters piece, “Republicans call Harris a failed border czar. The facts tell a different story”:

Tasked to deal with the root causes of migration… [Vice President Harris] immediately ran into the enormity of the mission… The region is riddled with corrupt government officials, the drivers of migration are deeply rooted in economic inequality and social factors… “She was given a very hard, difficult, convoluted portfolio,” said U.S. Senator Chris Murphy.

As we say in Boston, the job was wicked hahd. Not only that, she didn’t even have it! “Harris was never given the portfolio of border czar,” is how Reuters put it, adding, “Instead, Biden asked Harris to lead diplomatic efforts to reduce poverty, violence and corruption in Central America’s Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, as well as engage with Mexico.” Of course, Reuters used different language in 2021:

The new line is an open paradox: Harris was never given a border mandate, and that job she never got was also an impossible cross to bear.

The idea is everywhere. The New Yorker went on at length about the “political peril” of the “day-to-day, on-the-ground operational emergency” Biden dumped on Harris, while insisting that “at no point… has she been in charge of managing the border.” The New York Times just published a story saying Biden “did not assign… responsibility of overseeing the enforcement policies,” but also sniffled: “Some of her allies felt she had been handed a no-win portfolio,” citing the “scale of the gulf in economic opportunity between the United States and Central America.” NPR somehow played up the “treacherous” urgency of her assignment while underscoring it was a long-term “root causes” gig in the same sentence. And so on.

Beyond the regular press, even would-be watch-the-watcher outlets like Politifact are gaslighting the public to an extraordinary degree to complicate a simple story, setting an ominous tone for the Trump-Harris* race (I’ll remove the asterisk when I’m convinced Harris will really be the nominee). They’re using every old trick in the book, and some new ones: