In my February-issue editor’s
note, I lamented that “the fact-checking press gives the
president a pass,” in part by providing checks not “on the exercise
of power,” but rather “on the exercise of rhetoric.”

As if to illustrate my point, NBCnews.com’s First Read had a
breaking fact-check earlier today not on the comments that
President Barack Obama has made regarding gun policy, particular in
regards to his
23 executive orders on the topic, but rather the “sound
and fury” of the president’s critics.

Conservative opponents of President Obama have called
him a “dictator,” a “tyrant,” “imperial,” for proposing executive
actions he believes would help prevent gun violence.

“President Obama is again abusing his power by imposing his
policies via executive fiat instead of allowing them to be debated
in Congress,” charged Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who is
widely believed to be eyeing a 2016 White House run, in response to
the president’s announcement Wednesday.

But the 23 executive actions the president signed today do not
seem to go very far, as his critics suggest. In fact, most are
administrative – publishing letters, writing memos, and appointing
administrators.

It’s true: President Barack Obama is not a
“dictator.” It’s also true that NBC’s Domenico Montanaro did not
actually identify or link to anyone calling him one. The one
contestable Rubio claim is whether the president’s 23 gun-related
executive orders are examples of him “abusing his power,” a
judgment which strikes me as entirely within the eye of the
beholder. For example, prior to Obama’s inauguration, there were
many people–chief among them a politician named
Barack Obama–who believed that George W. Bush’s extensive use
of executive orders and signing statements in and of
itself constituted an abuse of power.

Providing an accurate fact-check on such a subjective judgment
is much more of a fool’s errand than, say, insisting that a single
baseball statistic definitively determines who was the
most “valuable” player in the American League last year. After
all, we measure baseball one hell of a lot more precisely than we
do the exercise of presidential power.

Instead we are left with the weasel-worded
and subjective retort that “the 23 executive actions the president
signed today do not seem to go very far.” And worse, this sentence
is offered as supporting evidence:

There is even one [order] the National Rifle Association would
seemingly embrace — No. 18 “Provide incentives for schools to hire
school resource officers.”

So NBC is now outsourcing its fact-checking judgment to the
NRA?

When you direct fact-checking at the exercise of power rather
than at the deployment of hyperbolic rhetoric in opposition to it,
you end up with a completely different category of question. A fine
example of which came this morning from our own
Jacob Sullum:

[I]t’s fair to judge President Obama’s gun control agenda, which
he is unveiling today, by the extent to which his proposals can
realistically be expected to prevent mass shootings like last
month’s attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown,
Connecticut. Why? Because that is how he himself described his
goal: “to make sure that the kinds of violence we saw at Newtown
doesn’t happen again” and to “make sure that somebody like the
individual in Newtown can’t walk into a school and gun down a bunch
of children in a shockingly rapid fashion.” 

Reason on Sandy
Hook and the subsequent fallout here.