George Santos, the ex-GOP legislator expelled from Congress last year for, among other things, telling tall tales, must be wondering what he did wrong. Perhaps the answer is that he didn’t take lessons from the Master.
For that man, Joe Biden, might’ve been able to tell Santos the one thing you must never, ever be guilty of: LWR.
That would be Lying While Republican.
Some may draw this conclusion upon witnessing Biden’s continual lying on the campaign trail about his family and personal history — and the mainstream media’s treatment of it.
Oh, it isn’t that they completely ignore it (just mostly). The New York Times reported on Biden’s prevarications just this past Sunday. In fact, that’s why I called Santos’s examples of having a “flexible relationship with the Truth” (isn’t euphemizing fun!) “tall tales.” I got that from the Times.
That’s how the Gray Lady characterized Biden’s “fibs.” The paper calls them “yarns,” too.
President Trump, though, is different, according to the mainstream media. He just lies.
As the Times relates, in “Biden’s telling, he was a teenage civil rights activist [he claimed the NAACP was the first organization he ever joined — at 15], a former trucker, the first in his family to go to college and the nephew of a cannibalism victim.” None of these things are true, the paper’s fact-checker, Linda Qiu, concedes. Yet perspective is necessary.
Biden merely relates “personal tales with rhetorical flourishes and factual liberty when he works a room or regales an audience,” she writes. “They are a way to connect with voters, emphasize his ‘middle-class Joe’ persona and charm his audience.” My, that little rascal!
And in Qiu’s very next paragraph, her article’s fourth sentence, she emphasizes that “these autobiographical embellishments differ in scale and significance from the stream of lies about a stolen election peddled by his opponent, former President Donald J. Trump.”
(Yes, just like “safe and effective,” don’t forget that the 2020 election was The Most Secure in American History™.)
Of course, how could we expect a fact check about Joe Biden to not be about Donald Trump?
This is par for the Times’ course, though. Two years back, critics pointed out that the paper had called Biden’s repeated lies “embellished narratives” in an October 2022 report.
Not everyone is taking kindly to Biden’s bushwa, however. On this past Sunday’s episode of The Big Weekend Show, Fox News Contributor Joey Jones stated, “It upsets me that he’s willing to take the tragedies within his own family and bastardize them so that he can score some weird political points.”
“The president retold the story of his maternal grandfather, Ambrose Finnegan[,] at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France,” reported Fox News, providing background. “Every time I show up at a military site where veterans are buried, it brings back memories of hearing my grandfather and my mother talk about the loss of their son and brother in the South Pacific,” the site related Biden as having said. Finnegan is the man Biden claimed was cannibalized, which, again, is factually untrue.
(Perhaps Biden is stealing a Rockefeller story, as young adventurer Michael Rockefeller apparently was eaten by New Guinean cannibals in the early ’60s.)
As for Jones, a retired U.S. Marine, he pointed out that Biden’s Aisne-Marne comments are part of his stolen-valor narrative, where he tries “to convince people that his son was killed in combat…. It really does bother me,” he said, Fox also related.
Biden isn’t alone among Democrats in shamelessly using, and abusing, family stories for political gain, however. In fact, perhaps the most egregious example involved then-vice president Al Gore’s speech at the 1996 Democratic National Convention. Recounting his sister’s untimely, smoking-induced 1984 death from lung cancer, Gore made an emotional, tear-evoking appeal.
“I knelt by her bed and held her hand,” Gore had claimed. “And in a very short time her breathing became labored and then she breathed her last breath.” He then later vowed, “And that is why until I draw my last breath, I will pour my heart and soul into the cause of protecting our children from the dangers of smoking.” The problem?
It’s not just that Gore was still accepting Big Tobacco donations in 1990, six years after his sister’s passing. It’s also that he touted his tobacco involvement while campaigning for the presidency in North Carolina in 1988.
“Throughout most of my life, I’ve raised tobacco,” he passionately told a Tar Heel State audience at the time. “I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put it in the plant beds and transferred it. I’ve hoed it. I’ve chopped it. I’ve shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it!” He just never told his sister to smoke it, perhaps.
Returning to Biden, at least The New York Times does cover his lies (though with sugar). In 2022, the paper “noted Biden has lied about being ‘raised in the Puerto Rican community at home,’ his academic record, his life story, being arrested when protesting civil rights, being arrested in South Africa, pinning a Silver Star on a Navy captain and even the timeline when he rode on Amtrak to visit his sick mother, among other things,” related Fox News. “He’s told other unbelievable stories that the Times failed to mention, such as the claim he confronted a gang leader named ‘Corn Pop’ in the 1960s.”
Of course, though, never forget, Biden is just weaving entertaining “yarns” and “embellishing narratives.” When Trump exaggerates, he’s the spawn of Satan.
And now you know why Professor Tim Groseclose found, as he wrote in 2011, that “media bias aids Democratic candidates by about 8 to 10 percentage points in a typical election.”
For those interested, the video below features some of Biden’s brazen lies.
