September 16, 2020

By Jake Johnson

Common Dreams

CNN journalist Daniel Dale is being applauded for his incisive and rapid fact-check of a Pennsylvania town hall Tuesday night in which President Donald Trump unleashed a torrent of bizarre and dangerous lies on subjects ranging from the coronavirus pandemic to protections for Americans with preexisting conditions to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

"There was just so much lying," Dale said in a CNN appearance Tuesday night, taking around three uninterrupted minutes to run through example after example of the president's falsehoods.

"He said again Democrats won't protect people with preexisting conditions. That is nonsense; as a voter told him, Democrats created those protections," Dale said. "He insisted he didn't praise China on the virus; he did so repeatedly, we know that. He claimed that nobody knew at the time he was praising China that seniors were especially susceptible to the virus; that was one of the first things we learned out of China and out of Italy and out of the U.S. He claimed that Biden said in March that the pandemic was 'totally over-exaggerated'; I can find no evidence that Biden ever said that."

After correcting a number of additional lies from the president, Dale said, "This is just a preliminary list. I have hours of fact-checking tonight to do because there is even more than this. This was just a fire hose of lying, again, from the president."

Watch:

Progressive commentator Erick Fernandez tweeted early Wednesday that "obviously what Daniel Dale does here is impressive in being able to quickly list Trump's lies."

"But what I appreciate about his fact-checking," Fernandez added, "is that he doesn't sugar coat it and calls lies for what they are."

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