OPINION:
Whoppers.
Those are what President Biden tells, according to the very liberal Washington Post.
He’s a liar.
Last week, Biden tried to cash in on civil rights just before Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, delivering a divisive speech in which he basically called all Republicans racist.
And in his speech to Black students in Atlanta, he made an outrageous claim that he was arrested during the civil rights movement that raged in the 1950s and ’60s, a claim that drew four Pinocchios from The Post.
“The struggle to protect voting rights has never been borne by one group alone. We saw Freedom Riders of every race, leaders of every faith, marching arm in arm — and yes, Democrats and Republicans in Congress of the United States and in the presidency,” Mr. Biden said in his speech.
“I did not live the struggles of Douglass, Tubman, King, Lewis, Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner, countless others known and unknown. I did not walk in the shoes of generation of students who walked these grounds. But I walked other grounds, because I’m so damn old I was there as well. They think I’m kidding, man. It seems like yesterday, the first time I got arrested — anyway,” he said to laughter.
“But their struggles, here, they’re the ones that opened my eyes as a high school student in the late ’50s and early ’60s. They got me more engaged in the work of my life,” the liar lied.
In an extensive fact-check, The Post gave the claim its highest rating for falsehoods, four Pinocchios, which means simply “whoppers.” The paper didn’t even bother trying to cover for Mr. Biden, just called him a bald-faced liar.
The paper, which strongly supported Mr. Biden throughout the 2020 campaign and endorsed his run for president, recounted that Mr. Biden has claimed police took him home numerous times. Still, even in his memoir, Mr. Biden never claims to have been arrested. Now, at 79 with a fleeting memory, he does.
“It’s possible that police might have taken the young Biden home from a dangerous situation — as he said twice — but that’s not an arrest,” The Post said. “Moreover, one would think such a memorable incident would have made it into one of Biden’s memoirs. Instead, it’s not mentioned in the book that specifically references the conversation with his mother about joining the ticket. Ordinarily, one would think such a memorable moment in a young man’s life would have merited an earlier recounting.”
“The primary source for this story is Biden — and we’ve learned over the years that he is not always a reliable source. He appears to be citing his mother to enhance his civil rights credentials — which we have noted he has exaggerated before — but too many elements do not add up to give this ‘arrest’ more credibility than his previous claims of getting in trouble with the law,” the paper said.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Biden claimed he was arrested in the 1970s in South Africa as he tried to visit Nelson Mandela in prison. Mr. Biden said he was arrested in Soweto, a suburb of Johannesburg, a city in the northeast of the country. But at the time, Mr. Mandela was being held on Robben Island, near Cape Town in the southwest part of the country. The two sites are 900 miles apart.
“This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid,” Mr. Biden said at a campaign event in South Carolina. “I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robbens Island.”
Mr. Biden referred to his own arrest twice more in the next seven days, including at a campaign stop in which he spoke of getting arrested in South Africa between efforts to coax his wife to marry him. That proposal occurred in 1977, both Bidens have said.
The New York Times also called Mr. Biden a liar, albeit in more words. The Times reached out to Andrew Young, a former congressman and mayor of Atlanta who was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1977 to 1979. Mr. Young said he traveled with Mr. Biden on a trip to South Africa.
“No, I was never arrested, and I don’t think he was, either,” Mr. Young, 87, told the Times.
Mr. Biden also never mentioned the arrest in his memoir, and “a check of available news accounts by The New York Times turned up no references to an arrest.”
The president has long played racial politics, a divisive strategy that is just fine with news outlets like The Post and The Times.
And he’s a pathological liar, telling “whoppers” in an attempt to steal glory.
It seems like those two once-great newspapers are good with that, too.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
