Let’s not beat around the bush – Joe Biden is a liar. That’s not a controversial claim or an attempt at character assassination during a presidential campaign; it’s merely a historically proven fact. And it isn’t something we can blame on the now-evident cognitive decline of his old age. His rocky relationship with the truth – Biden’s burden, if you will – predates the World Wide Web. The question isn’t whether the career Swamp critter’s fibbing is new so much as whether it’s worse than it was in the old days, or if tech has just finally caught up to him. It ain’t easy for an old liar in the internet age; it’s especially hard to hide from the truth today. Good thing Old Joe has a friendly media to do his lying for him now.
The Dark Ages
Let’s go back to a time before YouTube enabled everyone to upload video content to share with the world in 2005. Way back even before the world’s largest search engine, Google, was founded in 1998. We’re headed to a time before the World Wide Web was launched in 1991, to the ancient days of 1987 and Joe Biden’s disgraced retreat from the ’88 presidential race. For anyone alive in the ‘80s, calling 1987 ancient times may seem ridiculous, but technologically speaking, it isn’t all that silly. When most people – even many children – carry handheld devices in their pockets that make the computers of 1987 seem about as advanced as an abacus, those days might as well have been the Dark Ages.
The Highest Form of Flattery?
Biden was inspired by a performance of Neil Kinnock, a British politician who lost his own “presidential campaign” when running against Margaret Thatcher for Prime Minister. Kinnock delivered a stirring speech about his rise from poverty and obscurity. He positioned himself as an everyman and seemingly implied that, if the U.K. would just elect him, they could prove together that anyone really can make it to the top, no matter how low they began. Biden, who always considered himself a working-class fellow, saw it as a message tailored to fit his campaign. So he stole it. Biden didn’t just take Kinnock’s format and drop in his own facts; he used many of the Brit’s exact words and phrases and appropriated even the man’s personal history as his own. Joe wasn’t the first in his family to go to college, as he claimed while plagiarizing Kinnock. His ancestors weren’t coal miners.
Most Americans weren’t familiar with British politics, so Joe might have expected to get away with such shenanigans in local politics or maybe even a run for the Senate – but he should have known it wouldn’t fly in a presidential campaign. The press shredded Biden for both his theft and his lies, and rightly so. Then more examples came to light. As it turned out, Biden had lifted parts of speeches from Robert Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey as well. Next came the revelation that Biden had received an F in one law school course for plagiarizing five pages from a published article for his term paper.
Lies and Other Misbehavior
Biden always had an explanation, of course, for how the “slip up” occurred, but he later admitted that some of those excuses were lies. By his own admission, he falsely claimed that British official Denis Healey had given him the Kinnock tape. If you’re thinking Biden’s appropriation of other people’s lives to make himself relevant stops at plagiarism, think again. During the very same election cycle, Joe confessed that he had been untruthful in an earlier speech about joining sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie theaters.
Remember the more recent “lying, dog-faced pony soldier” incident, or when he challenged an elderly veteran to a push-up competition? Well, that’s standard fare for Joe, if perhaps a bit less coherent these days. When heckled at a campaign stop back in ‘87, Biden lashed out at the audience member, insulting the person’s intelligence and making up yet another lie. “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect,” he told the voter – who happened to be a teacher. “I went to law school on a full academic scholarship.” That and the later claim that he graduated in the top half of his class were both false. He also said he earned three undergraduate degrees, which, of course, he did not.
Eventually, the Biden campaign for the 1988 presidential election just couldn’t bear the weight of his malarkey, and he dropped out of the race.
Back to the Future
Back in August of 2019, Liberty Nation’s Jeff Charles dubbed Biden the Godfather of Gaffe, an apt moniker, though his Sultan of Stumble and Pharaoh of Flub were also solid options. Jeff gave a good list of Joe’s goofs up to that point, and that was before the former vice president said – during his presidential campaign – that he was running for Senate, that if you didn’t like him you could vote for the other Biden, or, more recently, that he felt confident he could defeat Joe Biden.
These are all examples of Biden’s cognitive decline, which has gotten much worse since the old days when the man was just a liar and plagiarist who had a regrettable history with women. But that history is still there. The primary difference now is that voters have the tech to adequately track it and share it with the world. Biden can’t escape his blunders or his lies by saying they never happened if you can simply Google them and watch the video evidence on YouTube. That doesn’t stop him from trying, of course.
Media Picking up the Slack
Nowadays, Joe Biden is the Democratic Party’s chosen one – and the mainstream media’s as well, it would seem. As such, the gaffes, lies, and even an alleged sexual assault never happened. The DNC runs cover for him. An apologist media makes up excuses for him. And now CNN is conspicuously leaving out details when explaining away his latest goof, the “you ain’t black” debacle. CNN tried to play off the comment by airing a clip of Biden touting his record with the black community. They cut it before the bit where Biden says, “The NAACP has endorsed me every time I’ve run. Come on, take a look at my record.” Of course – the NAACP has publicly rebutted that lie, so it had to be left out.
It’s times like this that they earn the affectionate moniker the Counterfeit News Network. Other such clever spins on the outlet’s name include Criminal News Network and, if you’re familiar with that time Reza Aslan drank booze from a human skull and ate what he was told was a person’s brain, the Cannibal News Network. “I feel this may have been a mistake,” Aslan said after the Aghori guru he was hanging out with threatened his life and then began eating his own feces as well as hurling some at Aslan. But at least back then some of the CNN crew were able to recognize when they had made a horrible mistake. No such clarity during the Biden campaign, it would seem.
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