By Noah Rothman
Friday, September 15, 2023
Joe Biden is a serial fabulist, habitual plagiarizer, and a reliable falsifier of facts
great and small alike. But while the president is a known liar, he’s not very
good at it.
Biden has developed a series of verbal tics that tend to
either precede or follow some of his more flagrant mendacities. One way to tell
that the president is pulling your leg is that he is quick to assure you that
what he has just said is “not a joke.”
“I may be a practicing Catholic, but [I] used to go to
7:30 Mass every morning in high school and then in college before I went to the
black church,” Biden told the congregants of Ebenezer Baptist Church in
Atlanta, Ga., during a service honoring Martin Luther King Jr. in January. “Not
a joke.” This isn’t the first time the president has claimed, “I was raised in
the black church politically,” adding, “not a joke,” but longtime attendees of
the Union Baptist Church in Wilmington, Del., have no recollection of the president’s attendance.
A close cousin of Biden’s “not a joke” formulation was on
display on Thursday when the president spoke with a group of rabbis by
telephone. Biden told his interlocutors that he was “raised in
synagogues in my state,” assuring his skeptical audience that “you think I’m
kidding, I’m not.”
Biden tags mendacities of greater import than his
personal biography with his “not a joke” formulation, too. “They told us
getting inflation under control, in order to do it, we had to lower wages and
increase unemployment. Not a joke,” Biden said on the anniversary of the so-called
Inflation Reduction Act’s passage. Biden credited the legislation for reducing
the rate of growth in inflation (a dubious claim) and insisted that the U.S. inflation rate was now
“lowest among the world’s leading economies” (a false claim).
Yet another presidential tell — one that frequently
irritates my former boss, Commentary magazine editor John Podhoretz — is often encountered whenever Biden
muses on his childhood. If the president spins a yarn in which a sage figure of
his youth begins by calling Joe Biden “Joey,” you can rest assured that what
follows will strain the bounds of credulity.
“Joey, it’s simple,” Biden recalled his working-class Catholic father
telling him upon their alleged espying of a gay couple engaged in public
displays of affection in the streets of 1950s-era Scranton, Pa. “They love each
other.”
Joseph Robinette Biden Sr. was good for many similar
pearls.
“You know, I — my dad, when I got elected vice president,
he said, ‘Joey, Uncle Frank fought in the Battle of the Bulge,’” the pater
familias Biden supposedly said of his uncle, who joined up to serve
the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked. “‘And he won the Purple Heart. And he
never received it. He never — he never got it. Do you think you could help him
get it? We’ll surprise him.’ So, we got him the Purple Heart.” President Biden
beamed in his recollection of personally awarding his uncle with one of the
military’s highest honors.
Frank Biden, the president’s uncle, did not volunteer after
Pearl Harbor — he joined up in July 1941. There is no record of Frank Biden
fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, though he was discharged seven months
after that fight in the summer of 1945. And while there is no evidence that
Biden’s uncle was ever awarded a Purple Heart, that is not necessarily
dispositive. But the White House either cannot or will not confirm Biden’s story.
“My dad used to say, ‘Joey,’” the president began
ominously in a 2021 speech, “and I swear to God, when he left Scranton, when
the coal died — my dad was not a — he was — he was a salesperson; he wasn’t a
coal miner. My great grandpop was.” Not quite. Edward Blewitt, Biden’s maternal great-grandfather, was a
civil and mining engineer before serving as a state senator, not a “coal
miner.”
The president occasionally relates a detail-rich story he
acquired in his years riding the rails involving Amtrak conductor Angelo Negri
— “Ange,” they called him. In one 2021 retelling of the tale, Biden recalled a
moment during his tenure as vice president. As Joe was traveling to see his
mother, who was “sick and in hospice,” Ange “comes up and goes, ‘Joey, baby,’
and grabs my cheek,” adding that he feared the Secret Service might use lethal
force to subdue the handsy conductor. They didn’t, and Ange subsequently
marveled over the number of miles Biden had traveled via the railways in his
career — “1,285,000 miles,” in fact.
“Biden did not reach the million-miles-[ridden] mark as
vice president until September 2015, according to his own past comments, but
Negri had died more than a year earlier, in May 2014,” a CNN fact check read. Moreover, Biden’s mother “died
more than five years prior.”
Maybe the most indicative of Biden’s giveaways is his
most egregious. You know you’ve just been privy to a whopper if the president
prefaces it by giving you his “word as a Biden.”
As vice president, Biden recalled that he was treated to
a tour of Konar province in Afghanistan by a four-star general; this was a trip
he took, despite the risks, to honor the heroism of a U.S. Navy captain. “We
can lose a vice president,” Biden said, dismissing his handlers’ concerns. “We
can’t lose many more of these kids. Not a joke.” Already we’re off the rails,
but the president went on:
The Navy captain, Biden recalled, .
. . had rappelled down a 60-foot ravine under fire and retrieved the body of an
American comrade, carrying him on his back. Now the general wanted Biden to pin
a Silver Star on the American hero who, despite his bravery, felt like a
failure.
“He said, ‘Sir, I don’t want the
damn thing!’” Biden said, his jaw clenched and his voice rising to a shout.
“‘Do not pin it on me, Sir! Please, Sir. Do not do that! He died. He died!’” .
. .
“This is the God’s truth,” Biden
had said as he told the story. “My word as a Biden.” [Emphasis added.]
“Except almost every detail in the story appears to be
false,” the Washington Post’s verdict read. Based on over a
dozen interviews with the figures in this story, the Post determined
that Biden “jumbled elements of at least three actual events into one story of
bravery, compassion, and regret that never happened.”
“I give you my word as a Biden,” read a September
2021 presidential tweet. “If you make under $400,000 a year,
I’ll never raise your taxes one cent.” But when Biden committed himself to the
ultimately failed pursuit of a $4 trillion radical alteration to the American
social compact — the Build Back Better agenda — the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation found that “taxpayers
across all income levels will face a tax increase under the bill in a direct
violation of President Biden’s pledge to not raise taxes on anyone making less
than $400,000 per year.”
But perhaps we should have seen all this coming. “I give
you my word as a Biden,” the president tweeted in March
2020. “When I’m president, I will . . . always tell you the truth.”
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