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Here We Go Again: Biden Invents Another False Story About His Past

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  December 19, 2022 1:05 PM

Earlier this year, I wrote a fairly lengthy piece about Joe Biden's long history of embellishing his past -- or outright inventing stories, often to serve some self-aggrandizing end, or for purposes of political ingratiation.  It's sometimes creepy.  It's often shameless.  More than anything, it's weird.  This phenomenon isn't a function of his advanced age; Biden has been spinning tales for decades.  But he's more liable to get caught under the scrutiny that accompanies the presidency, and that's exactly what's happened on multiple occasions.  

Here's the latest example, in case you missed it.  There he goes again...

These things often include some claim about what his father told him ("Joey..."), with "no joke" or "I'm serious" peppered in.  In other words, this clip was very on brand for the genre.  A few small factual problems:

President Biden claimed Friday that his uncle Frank Biden won the Purple Heart for his actions during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II — but there’s no evidence of the award and key details of the story are chronologically impossible...Biden told the story apparently to make a point about the humility of veterans, but the known facts indicate it’s not true...Biden’s father, Joseph R. Biden Sr., died in September 2002 — more than six years before his son was elected vice president. Frank Biden, Joe Sr.’s brother, died in 1999...The White House did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment. The Defense Department referred questions to the Army — the military branch in which Frank Biden served — but the Army did not immediately respond. Frank Biden’s tombstone does not identify him as a Purple Heart honoree, nor does his obituary. A partial registry of known Purple Heart recipients also doesn’t note anyone by that name receiving the award, though that database is not comprehensive. The Post’s librarians could not locate prior references to Frank Biden receiving the Purple Heart, which recognizes wounded and killed soldiers, in the Nexis archive and the Factba.se repository of Joe Biden’s public statements also doesn’t contain prior references.

The New York Post fact check continues:

The tale involving Biden’s uncle is similar to another emotionally impactful but false story told by then-presidential candidate Joe Biden in 2019 — this one involving a Navy captain supposedly refusing to accept a Silver Star for his heroism in Afghanistan. A Washington Post fact check from the time said Biden “jumbled elements of at least three actual events into one story of bravery, compassion, and regret that never happened.” Biden made other dubious remarks Friday, including telling veterans that “twice as president” he had been “in and out of Afghanistan and Iraq and those areas” — despite never visiting Afghanistan and Iraq as president and getting no closer than the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, almost 300 miles from the Iraqi border.

A nonstop blizzard of false memories, conflation, and exaggeration.  But if reports are to be believed, the Biden 2024 train has never before been chugging forward at this clip.  The top Democrats in Congress have publicly encouraged the president to seek re-election, and the First Lady is now said to be enthusiastically on board and all in.  And the news media, which was poised to plunge the knife into their party's lame duck leader in the event of a midterms wipeout, has toggled back to tentative cheerleading mode.  This is just amazing:

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I suppose the marriage bill is an accomplishment, even though it couldn't have passed without Republican votes (I had more to say about the legislation and its signing here and here).  Biden explicitly failed to negotiate a bargain on the rail strike, punting the issue to Congress.  But hey, he signed what they passed, so there's that.  The Brittney Griner trade is an achievement of sorts, but not without extremely serious downsides and trade-offs.  And then there's the nuclear fusion breakthrough, the inclusions of which on this list made me laugh out loud.  Thank you, Mr. President for doing that Science for all of us.  What an accomplishment.  I'll leave you with leftists starting to coalesce around a new enemy who's even worse and more dangerous than Trump.  So predictable: