President Joe Biden has continued his notorious practice of outrageous fabrications and using the misfortunes of his own family — even falsely telling the mother of a slain serviceman that his son, Beau, had also come home in a “flag-draped coffin.” The truth is that Beau Biden died six years after returning from Iraq, of cancer. On Monday, families of the 13 servicemembers who were killed during the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan criticized Biden’s falsehoods.
One of the “Gold Star Moms” — women who have lost a child in the military service of the United States — Cheryl Cox was particularly outraged at what she described as Biden’s “heartless” likening of her son’s death in a combat situation to his own son’s death from cancer, unrelated to combat. Cox’s son, Marine Lance Corporal Dylan Merola, died in combat on August 26, 2021 when the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul was attacked in an ISIS suicide bombing.
Cox, speaking at a forum of Gold Star families in Escondido, California, organized by Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican who represents the area in Congress, recounted what the president had said to her: “My wife, Jill, and I know how you feel. We lost our son as well and brought him home in a flag-draped coffin.”
The truth is that Beau did not return from Iraq in a “flag-draped coffin,” but instead died at the age of 46 of brain cancer — six years after returning from Iraq. While there is no reason to question that Beau Biden honorably served his country in Iraq, he was not killed in action there, and he did not return to America in a flag-draped coffin.
Cox’s son, on the other hand, was attempting to evacuate thousands of Afghan allies, as well as several hundred Americans from the country, as the U.S.-supported Afghan government was imploding while the Taliban rebels were on the offensive to recapture control of the country.
Cox recalled her reaction to Biden’s claim to her that Beau had died in action like her son. “My heart started beating faster and I started shaking, knowing that their son died from cancer and they were able to be by his side.” Cox added, “After this encounter, I have never had any personal correspondence, nor has my son been honored or his name spoken by this commander-in-chief or his administration on what I feel is because of their failures and poor planning to exit our troops from Afghanistan.”
It is not the first time that Biden has embellished, to put it mildly, a family tragedy. Just a week before Christmas in 1972, Biden’s first wife, Neilia, was killed when she pulled out in front of a tractor-trailer, along with her one-year-old daughter, Naomi. Biden’s two sons, Beau and Hunter, were also severely injured in the accident, but survived.
Biden had just been elected to the U.S. Senate from Delaware, and he later recalled the incident while running for vice-president in 2008. “A tractor-trailer, a guy who allegedly — and I never pursued it — drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly and killed my daughter instantly, and hospitalized my two sons.”
Newswoman Katie Couric reported the story, that a drunk driver had killed Biden’s first wife, as a fact. However, the driver, Curtis Dunn, actually had the right-of-way, and there is no indication that he had been drinking at all. In fact, Dunn was the first to render assistance at the scene. Delaware Superior Court Judge Jerome Herlihy, who was the chief prosecutor overseeing the accident investigation at the time, responded to queries about Biden’s assertion that a drunk driver killed his wife and daughter, saying, “The rumor about alcohol being involved by either party, especially the truck driver, is incorrect.”
Dunn’s daughter was incensed that Biden would smear her father as a drunk driver who killed a woman and a girl. “I just burst into tears. The story already is tragic enough, why did he have to sensationalize it by saying my father was drunk?”
Biden is also guilty of plagiarizing the personal stories of other politicians, including British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock and U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy, in an effort to advance his political campaigns. For example, Biden quoted, almost word-for-word, Kinnock’s personal anecdotes about his impoverished upbringing, except that Biden simply substituted Kinnock’s stories as his own.
Why is this important? It tells us that Biden is quite willing to deviate from the truth, which should make us question some of his other claims, such as his assertion that he did not work with his son, Hunter Biden, in his foreign business dealings. And, since those foreign business dealings had serious implications for U.S. foreign policy, the question of whether Biden is a serial liar is a very important one.
Unfortunately, just like when Katie Couric simply accepted Biden’s version of the events surrounding the death of his first wife, the left-leaning media is unlikely to care much, one way or the other.
