“No man,” said Abraham Lincoln, “has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.”
Sadly, that excellent piece of indisputable presidential wisdom hasn’t filtered down to the current occupant of the White House.
Joe Biden is a terrible liar in every sense; he lies on a terrible scale, and he’s terrible at lying.
And as much as I’d like to be kind to an old man and put his constant untrue statements down to memory issues caused by his advanced age and cognitive decline, it’s not because of that at all.
No, President Biden just likes to tell humongous self-promoting whoppers, again and again and again.
He’s done it his entire political life, and now he’s lying so often and so badly that even his most diehard uncritical supporters can’t excuse him anymore.
CNN, my former employer, has bent over into positions even the Kama Sutra hasn’t thought of in a concerted effort to paint Biden as a beacon of honesty sent to rescue America from fork-tongued Donald Trump.
But even CNN’s given up.
Last week, after Biden brazenly and shamefully lied about being at Ground Zero the day after 9/11, CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale unleashed a devastating critique that directly accused the president of having an “unfortunate pattern, at this point, of either inventing or embellishing stories about his own past, his biography — he did it three times in one speech last month alone!”
Dale then cited a long list of Biden’s lies, which included him claiming to have witnessed the collapse of a bridge in Pittsburgh last year when it collapsed hours before he arrived in the city; claiming to have visited a synagogue in the same city after worshippers were killed in a mass shooting in 2018 when he was never there at all; and claiming his grandfather died a few days before he was born at the same hospital when in fact he’d died a year before at a different hospital in a different state.
There were just two problems with Dale’s sudden come-to-veracity moment of awakening about Biden’s propensity for lying.
First, he couldn’t bring himself to use the word “lie” despite regularly calling Donald Trump a liar during his tenure as president.
Second, by using the qualifying words “at this point,” he suggests this is some new habit Biden’s only recently developed.
It’s not.
He’s always done it.
And when he’s come up with a good new lie to improve his image, he has no compunction about repeating it myriad times, sometimes for decades.
Take his claim to have been arrested by apartheid police in South Africa in the 1970s while trying to see Nelson Mandela in prison.
On the 30th anniversary of Mandela’s release, Biden proudly declared: “I had the great honor of being arrested with our UN ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robbens [sic] Island.”
Aside from the fact that Soweto is 760 miles from Robben Island, Andrew Young, America’s ambassador to the UN at the time, said neither was arrested.
Eventually, during his presidential campaign in 2020, Biden admitted it was a lie: He’d never been arrested.
Yet this hadn’t stopped him even boasting that Mandela threw his arms around him when they met many years later in Washington, DC, and thanked him with the words: “You got arrested trying to see me!”
It takes an almost psychopathic-level liar to use and abuse one of the greatest leaders in history in such a disingenuous way to make yourself look good.
But this is what Biden does all the time, and he’s getting worse.
His 9/11 lie last week was perhaps his most insidious yet.
Imagine being president of the United States, and in a speech on the 22nd anniversary of the terror attack, you say you were at Ground Zero the next day, when you weren’t actually there until nine days later?
It’s grotesque.
As are his oft-repeated false claims that the driver of the other car in the accident that tragically killed his first wife and baby daughter was drunk — he wasn’t — and that his war hero son Beau died serving his country in Iraq when, as everyone knows, he very sadly died from brain cancer in the US.
President Pinocchio lies just as easily about policy decisions, like saying with a straight face that the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal was a big success, and pretending the southern border is secure when it’s a porous, deadly fiasco.
And he’s currently engaged in the biggest ongoing lie of all, which is his preposterous insistence that he never once spoke to his surviving son, Hunter, about his corrupt business deals.
It’s gotten to the stage where it’s hard to believe a single word that comes out of Joe Biden’s mouth, because when he’s not actively lying, he’s saying insane things like “God save the Queen, man!” nine months after attending Queen Elizabeth’s funeral.
On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” his predecessor said of Biden: “Look at all the lies he’s told. Everything he says is like a lie. It’s terrible!”
It is.
And just how appalling a liar do you have to be for Donald Trump to be outraged by your lying?
ncG1vNJzZmimqaW8tMCNnKamZ2Jlf3R7j3JmanBfpb%2Bmv8idnKesXaW2r7vCnJ%2Bip12fvKZ5yKxkmmWkp8KtxYytnKuqmZe5pnnLopirZw%3D%3D