Luke Savage of the Far Left Jacobin Magazine, put Joe Biden’s most salient personality trait this way: Joe Biden’s astonishing propensity to make things up is a major liability for him. But
Democratic voters have been largely kept in the dark about those lies by liberal media outlets.
Republican and Independent voters have also been kept in the dark about those lies by the liberal media, and with liberal outlets huffing and puffing about the need to fact-check President Trump in real-time during tonight’s debate, it will be interesting to see if Biden trots out any of his most well-worn lies about himself.
Among the many falsehoods Mr. Savage cited in his article this one stands out:
Though hastily forgotten, if indeed many noticed it at all, Biden last summer spun an elaborate tale about visiting Afghanistan to honor a Naval officer who he said had rappelled down a ravine while under fire to retrieve the body of a fellow soldier. “This is God’s truth,” Biden said, “My word as a Biden.” But as the Washington Post, having investigated the story, put it at the time…
… almost every detail in the story appears to be incorrect … it appears as though the former vice president has jumbled elements of at least three actual events into one story of bravery, compassion and regret that never happened … The upshot: In the space of three minutes, Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.
In an article for The Washington Examiner, "Six times Biden described major events in his life that never happened," Alana Goodman documented this Biden whopper:
While running for president in 2008, Biden told the United Mine Workers that he was a coal miner.
“I hope you won’t hold it against me, but I am a hard-coal miner, anthracite coal, Scranton, Pennsylvania,” Biden said. “It’s nice to be back in coal country. It’s a different accent [in Virginia], but it’s the same deal. We were taught that our faith and our family was the only really important thing, and our faith and our family informed everything we did."
The Biden campaign later told the AP that his comment was a “joke.” But it echoed another false claim he had made about coming from a family of coal miners during his 1988 campaign.
In a 1988 speech, Biden referred to “my ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours.” That line was plagiarized from a speech by British politician Neil Kinnock, whose family actually did work in the mines.
In 2004, Biden acknowledged that he did not have family members who worked in mining.
“Hell, I might be president now if it weren't for the fact I said I had an uncle who was a coal miner. Turns out I didn't have anybody in the coal mines, you know what I mean? I tried that crap — it didn't work,” he said during an interview with Jon Stewart.
Since the start of the 2020 campaign, wrote Valerie Richardson of the Washington Times, Mr. Biden has been caught on numerous occasions spinning false and even ludicrous yarns, a tendency that has prompted head-scratching from his supporters and exasperation from conservatives stunned that his tall tales have yet to torpedo his salt-of-the-earth image.
“This has been a career-long problem that he’s had,” said Rick Manning, president of the free-market Americans for Limited Government. “I think a lot of people look at the things he’s doing now, and say, oh, he’s getting older, and that may be true, but the fact is, this is his historical record. This is not a recent phenomenon. This is who he is.”
And in our view the falsehood that is most dispositive of Joe Biden’s lack of character is this one from the trove Ms. Richardson documented:
In 2001 and 2007, he indicated that the 1972 car crash that killed his wife Neilia and baby daughter was caused by a driver who had too much to drink, even though the investigation said otherwise.
The family of the driver, Curtis C. Dunn, wrote to Mr. Biden the first time asking him to stop. He agreed, but then repeated the line in 2007, saying that the driver “allegedly — and I never pursued this — drank his lunch.” He apologized in a call to Mr. Dunn’s daughter in 2008, according to the Newark Post.
“Joe’s calling card is decency, an affable man without a malicious bone in his body. Yet he allowed Dunn, who died in 1999, to go to his grave having been falsely shamed by Biden as a drunk driver responsible for the death of Biden’s wife and newborn daughter,” said conservative radio host Larry Elder in a March op-ed on RealClearPolitics. “What ‘decent’ man does that.”
As Mr. Savage of the Jacobin put it in words that really can’t be improved upon, “America’s bifurcated media structure, founded on a corporate business model that has effectively commodified partisan infotainment, is among the major reasons Biden’s cavalcade of lies hasn’t really become a story among liberals. Some simply haven’t heard about them. Many others, meanwhile, are liable to greet the reports that do emerge with a perfunctory shrug (who among us, after all, is going to trust a story that originated on Fox News?) or worse, dismiss them all as part of a right-wing conspiracy even when they turn out to be credible or demonstrably true.
“More than anything else, this epistemological loophole explains how it is that partisan liberals are so often able to ignore or even contravene their own espoused standards in the face of information that may harm their side. It’s why so few regularly incensed by Donald Trump’s untruths seem to care that a former Democratic vice president has a well-documented history of making things up…”
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