Some of Biden`s countless lies
Start with honesty.
Biden lies routinely and pointlessly. His first presidential campaign, in 1988, went off the rails because his speeches included plagiarized passages. He didn’t just steal turns of phrase from the British politician Neil Kinnock; he stole his autobiography,
pretending that his family too had worked coal mines and that he too had been the first of his name to get a college degree “in a thousand generations.”
Biden has been on notice for a long time, then, about the dangers of this kind of embellishment. Still, he can’t help himself. During this year’s campaign, he had to
retract a story he had repeatedly told about being arrested “on the streets of Soweto” while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison. Mandela supposedly thanked him for his trouble. It never happened. His revised story is that for a while he wasn’t allowed to leave an airport since he refused to go through a door for whites.
Even in the case of a story that garners Biden enormous and deserved sympathy — the loss of his wife and young daughter in a 1972 car accident — he edits the truth, and not in an innocent way. For many years
he presented them as victims of a drunk driver. There was no evidence that the other driver was drunk; he wasn’t even at fault. That driver’s daughter
wrote to Biden in 2001 to ask him to stop denigrating her late father, and he wrote a conciliatory note back. In 2007, during Biden’s second presidential campaign, he told the false story again. He apologized for it
in 2009.
Biden isn’t above dishonesty when talking about his public record, either. During this presidential run, his third, he said that he opposed the Iraq war as soon as it started. In truth, he voted for it and supported it, coming out against it only after
two and a half years.
The Lincoln Project’s pro-Biden ad highlighted remarks he made in
a speech in June: "I won’t traffic in fear and division. I won’t fan the flames of hate. I'll seek to heal the racial wounds that have long plagued our country, not use them for political gain.” Maybe that’s what he’ll do in the future. It’s not how he has behaved in the past. In 2012, he infamously said that if Mitt Romney won the presidency, “They’re going to put y’all back in chains.” While the Obama campaign insisted it wasn't a reference to slavery,
Republicans and
Democrats alike interpreted it as one.
Biden hasn’t distinguished himself from run-of-the-mill politicians in his devotion to principle, either. He
said he would support Robert Bork if Ronald Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court. If liberal groups “tear me apart, that’s the medicine I’ll have to take.” Then the nomination came, liberals opposed it, and Biden fell in line.
For decades, Biden opposed federal funding for abortion, even sometimes voting against it in cases of rape and incest. In 1994, he
wrote a constituent that “the government should not tell those with strong convictions against abortion, such as you and I, that we must pay for them.” He flipped on the issue to get through this year’s primaries.
