By Christian Schneider
Thursday, June 13, 2024
“There’s only one thing I hate more than lying: skim
milk, which is water lying about being milk.” —Ron Swanson, Parks
and Recreation
On Tuesday, shortly after his son Hunter was found guilty
of breaking federal gun laws, Joe Biden stood in front of a pro-gun-control
group, buttressing his anti-gun position with phony credentials.
“When I was no longer the vice president, I became a
professor at the University of Pennsylvania,” Biden said, adding that he had
previously “taught the Second Amendment” in a constitutional-law class.
Of course, Biden was a “professor” at Penn in the same
way a powdered beef-flavored ramen noodle packet contains filet mignon. Biden —
evidently unaware this information is available on the internet — was paid
nearly a million dollars to be a “professor” but never taught any classes; he was
effectively there as a figurehead to attract donors. In fact,
with his degree from the Wharton School of Business, Donald Trump has seen four
more years’ worth of Penn classrooms than Biden has. (In fairness, Biden did
spend years teaching a constitutional-law class, but it was at Widener University. On Tuesday, he was clearly
trying to get some of that Ivy League shine.)
Occasionally, Biden lies about things that benefit him
politically. In the 2012 election campaign, he laughably told a majority
African-American audience that Mitt Romney would re-enslave them. As president,
he tells young people he is “canceling” their student debt when he is just
shoveling their piles of bills onto plumbers and secretaries. He absurdly
called revised voting laws in Georgia “Jim Crow 2.0.” (He declared the laws to be so bad they were
“Jim Eagle,” confusing voters and ornithologists in equal measure.)
But most of the time, Biden’s lies are about weird, creepy things for which
he actually has no reason to lie. Things that don’t help him with voters but
that he seems to think make him more interesting.
The weirdest of his lies, delivered to reporters in April, was his claim that his uncle,
Ambrose Finnegan, fell victim to cannibals after being shot down over New
Guinea while flying a single-engine plane during World War II. Of course, both
military experts and anthropologists declared the idea that “Uncle Bosie” ended
up roasting on a spit with an apple in his mouth to be nonsense.
How is it that having an uncle cannibalized would reflect
favorably on you? What gears must turn in the political mind to
trick oneself into believing this? Has anyone ever looked at a candidate and
thought, “I like where he stands on taxes, but I’m concerned that no one in his
family was turned into a plate of ribs”?
(The prime minister of Papua New Guinea, no doubt at the
urging of the tourism board, immediately denied that cannibalism
took place in his country. Wouldn’t want potential visitors to worry that once
they exited their plane, someone from the chamber of commerce would appear and
start basting them in garlic-butter sauce.)
But the lies fall so easily from Biden’s lips that it’s
difficult to discern whether he knows he isn’t telling the truth. You may
recall the story about “Corn Pop,” the black gang leader Biden says he confronted
in 1962 after a disagreement at a swimming pool. While there was a young man
named Corn Pop, people who knew him thought Biden’s story was bogus. Perhaps he is
misremembering some other cereal-related crime in which he was shivved by Count
Chocula.
Biden has routinely said he once “had a house burn down with my wife in it,”
when, in fact, reporting from the time says it was a “small fire that was
contained to the kitchen.” He says his 1972 U.S. Senate opponent once nominated him to attend the U.S. Naval Academy and
regretted that Biden didn’t accept it because doing so would have made him
ineligible to run for Senate for the first time that year. (An especially weird
claim, as beginning school at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1961 or 1962 would not
have prevented Biden from running in 1972. There is no record of Biden ever
receiving a nomination or of his opponent regretting offering him one.)
Astute readers will note that the other major-party
candidate running for president this year is a walking falsehood, prone to
outrageous lies and exaggerations. But the lies Donald Trump tells, as
egregious as they are, typically have a point. When he says he never met E.
Jean Carroll and never had sex with Stormy Daniels, it’s obvious why. When he
claims the 2020 election was rigged against him or exaggerates the size of his
inauguration crowd, Trump is attempting to project a strength he thinks will appeal
to his base.
In other words, Trump’s whoppers are intentional. The
most objectionable thing about Trump isn’t the preposterous lies he tells, it’s
the things about him that are actually true.
Like Trump, other presidents who lie are merely serving
their own interests. When Richard Nixon said he knew nothing about the
Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up, he was trying to escape the noose
of impeachment. When a later president said he did “not have sexual relations
with that woman,” he was trying to wriggle out of legal peril. Barack Obama’s
claim that “if you like your health-care plan, you can keep it” was brazen
balderdash to get his signature law passed.
On the other hand, Joe “Lie-den” (I am offering that to
the Trump campaign, free of charge) serves up nonsense without any rhyme or
reason.
Last year, while scandalizing the virgin eyes of NR’s
readers by calling Biden an epithet that also names a certain body part, Charles C. W. Cooke ran through a
partial list of the president’s most famous lies. Biden preposterously claimed he was “arrested with our
U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see [Nelson Mandela]
on Robben Island.” He routinely claims that his son Beau died in Iraq; he actually died from glioblastoma at
Walter Reed military hospital in Bethesda, Md. Biden did not graduate, as he
claims, in the top half of his law school class; rather, he finished 76th in a class of 85. One of Biden’s most famous episodes
occurred when he was caught plagiarizing large chunks of a
law-review article, effectively lying about whether he had an original thought.
Even if you give Biden the benefit of the doubt and
refuse to attribute to malice what can be explained by senility, his lies are
just plain weird. Why would a current president — that line on a résumé would
seem to be adequate — continue to misrepresent his academic credentials?
Maybe the weirdest lie of all is his tale of representing, as a young lawyer, a 23-year-old
welder who “lost part of his penis and one of his testicles” in an accident at
a Delaware factory. No part of the story appears to be true, although there was
a similar 1964 case that occurred while Biden was a
junior at the University of Delaware, well before he attended law school. Most
astonishing of all, last October, Biden told this story to special
counsel Robert Hur.
By this point, the voting public would be grateful for
some ordinary political whoppers. And that’s no lie.
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