The NY Times is connecting some dots here, noting that President Biden has made a number of claims about the economy recently that aren’t true. But the framing of the piece, for the most part, puts all of this down to the normal Biden habit of “embellishing the truth.”

As President Biden and his administration have told it in recent months, America has the fastest-growing economy in the world, his student debt forgiveness program passed Congress by a vote or two, and Social Security benefits became more generous thanks to his leadership.

None of that was accurate.

The president, who has long been seen as embellishing the truth, has recently overstated his influence on the economy, or omitted key facts. This week, Mr. Biden praised himself for giving retirees a raise during a speech in Florida.

“On my watch, for the first time in 10 years, seniors are getting an increase in their Social Security checks,” he declared. The problem: That increase was the result of an automatic cost-of-living increase prompted by the most rapid inflation in 40 years. Mr. Biden had not done anything to make retirees’ checks bigger — it was just a byproduct of the soaring inflation that the president has vowed to combat…

Mr. Biden’s comment to Jimmy Kimmel in June about America’s rapid economic growth being the fastest in the world was contradicted by an International Monetary Fund report in July that showed several countries in Europe and Asia were growing faster than the United States this year.

Several paragraphs in the middle of the article are devoted to assuring readers that Biden’s exaggerations are nothing like’s Trump’s exaggerations. But eventually the authors do acknowledge that some of what Biden has been saying just doesn’t make any sense.

The more recent presidential pronouncement at a forum in October that the student debt relief program passed Congress was perhaps the most head-scratching. It was starkly at odds with the reality that Mr. Biden rolled out the initiative through executive action and that it was being challenged in the courts. A White House official said that Mr. Biden was referring to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which did not include student debt relief.

And when Mr. Biden said in September gas prices were averaging below $2.99 a gallon in 41 states and the District of Columbia, they were actually $1 higher. The White House corrected the transcript of his remarks.

I wrote about Biden’s weird statement about student debt relief when it happened. As I said at the time. it was difficult to tell if he was lying or just deeply confused, but “ever since the ‘Where’s Jackie?‘ gaffe late last month, I think confusion should now be the default explanation.”

While I think Biden was probably confused, the White House was clearly lying when they tried to explain away his confusion by claiming he was talking about the Inflation Reduction Act.

Statement from the WH on Biden’s claim about passing student loan forgiveness “by a vote or two”— they say he was referring to the IRA, which reduced deficit in order to generate savings to pay for student loan cancellation https://t.co/w0eQ1ik41q pic.twitter.com/wHo9ook2Ce

— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) October 24, 2022

As the Times points out, student debt relief wasn’t in the bill. The fact that their explanation made no sense at all didn’t seem to bother anyone in the White House.

The White House was also lying when they took down a tweet about the big increase in Social Security checks. The White House press secretary claimed the tweet was pulled down because it “was not complete.” But the actual reason is because readers added context to the tweet saying what the Times said today, i.e. that the increase had nothing to do with Biden (except for the fact that he and his party were partly responsible for the inflation that triggered it).

This is embarrassing. pic.twitter.com/8iC57NVa5t

— Kate Davidson (@KateDavidson) November 2, 2022

Again, it’s good the Times is making some effort to not let the president get away with this stuff, but the assurances that it’s all just normal political embellishment or at least normal for Joe Biden is a stretch. There are rumors circulating on Twitter today that the Times is working on a big story about Biden’s mental state, a story that won’t be published until after the election. I don’t know if those rumors are true but if the Times isn’t already working on that story it really ought to be. I don’t think Biden’s claim about student debt relief was an embellishment, I think it was a sign of serious confusion on his part and it’s not the first such sign.