This week two so-called journalists embarrassed themselves in ways that exposed their naked need to defend, even at this late date, Joe Biden.

In his latest Bastiat’s Window post, Bob Graboyes fills us in:

The excess and carelessness engendered by political servility plopped squarely this week upon the heads of Charles P. Pierce (Esquire magazine) and Ana Navarro-Cárdenas (ABC’s The View). Both sought to justify Joe Biden’s sweeping pardon of Hunter Biden by pointing to peculiar antecedents. Pierce cited George H. W. Bush’s pardon of his son Neil, and Navarro-Cárdenas cited Woodrow Wilson’s pardon of his brother-in-law Hunter deButts. Their examples were peculiar because (1) Neil Bush was never convicted or even charged with any crimes, and (2) Hunter deButts never existed. Navarro-Cárdenas learned of Hunter deButts’s pardon from the often-hallucinatory ChatGPT. Pierce apparently bypassed electronic sources, plumbed purported facts from the depths of his own imagination, shunted them past whatever vestigial fact-checking routines exist at Esquire, and shot them out to gullible readers. Across the Internet some of those readers are yet spreading the Parables of Neil Bush and Hunter deButts.

In the Pierce article, the glaring mistake was in claiming that Bush 41 pardoned his son, something that never happened, as the author could readily have discovered. So how did things end? Like this:

The link now leads to a forlorn statement that:

“This Column Is No Longer Available

Editor’s Note: This column has been removed due to an error. The original article stated incorrectly that President George H. W. Bush gave a presidential pardon to his son, Neil Bush. Esquire regrets the mistake.”

As for Navarro:

When the AI told of “Hunter deButts”—which sounds like a Bart Simpson prank-call name—it didn’t occur to her to do a simple Google search to verify its authenticity. She went ahead and posted it as fact. When called to task for this misinformation, she sneered at those offering the corrections and provided a ChatGPT printout as proof text. Middle-schoolers have greater awareness of electronic sources.