President Joe Biden has a richer fantasy life than Walter Mitty. And he’s had one for going on 40 years.
In 1987, when he ran for the Democrat presidential nomination, Biden said he was the first in his family to attend college. He repeated the tall tale during his run for the nomination in 2020.
Also during that campaign, he recalled the time he was arrested in South Africa when he tried to visit communist terror leader Nelson Mandela in prison.
A few months ago, he regaled listeners with tales of his days looking at the world through a windshield as a long-haul truck driver.
And just yesterday, he told black students about the time he was arrested during a civil rights protest.
Yet the most recent tales of his remarkable life as lion of the Left might not be lies. They might be signs of Alzheimer’s Disease.
“So Damn Old”
The occasion of Biden’s latest bogus blast from the past was a speech at the historically black Morehouse College. It was the latest push to pass a bill that would federalize elections and cement voter fraud forever.
That bill failed today, as did Biden’s memory yesterday.
“The struggle to protect voting rights has never been borne by one group alone,” Biden said. “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.”
How many Freedom Riders Biden actually saw is open to question.
Continued the man now known as “Bare Shelves”:
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 the 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. But their struggles, here, they’re the ones that opened my eyes as a high school student in the late 50’s and early 60’s. They got me more engaged in the work of my life.
In fact Biden didn’t live through many struggles at all — or at least any not of his own making.
Joe and George
One of them was the sudden end to his 1987 presidential run after he made up a yarn about being the first in his family to graduate college. He repeated that story, stolen from British Labour Leader Neil Kinnock, during his run for the White House in 2020:
“Guys like me, the first in my family to go to college,” Biden said, “we are as good as anybody else, and guys like Trump, who inherited everything and squandered what they inherited, are the people I’ve always had a problem with.”
After that, Biden unspooled a fabricated tale of his academic prowess.
The Mandela story is another one from the campaign. “This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid,” Biden said:
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.
And in July, Biden recalled — falsely, of course — the times that “I used to drive an 18-wheeler, man.”
The tires went flat on that one the minute it hit the road.
Worst of all, though, after recalling the arrest that never happened for the scholars at Morehouse, Biden didn’t mention something that did happen, when he rhetorically asked Republicans how they wished to be remembered, apropos of the “voting rights” bill he discussed.
“So, I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered?” he said:
At consequential moments in history, they present a choice: Do you want to be the si- — on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in September 1988 that Mr. Biden, while campaigning in Alabama that year, “talked of his sympathy for the South, bragged of an award he had received from George Wallace in 1973 and said ‘we (Delawareans) were on the South’s side in the Civil War.’”
As well, those many years ago, the Detroit Free Press reported that Biden “tells southerners that the lower half of his state is culturally part of Dixie; he reminds them that former Alabama Gov. George Wallace praised him as one of the outstanding young politicians of America.”
False memories are a symptom of cognitive trouble and Alzheimer’s Disease. “False memories are extremely common in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and the pre-Alzheimer’s condition of mild cognitive impairment,” says Dr. Andrew Budson, an expert on the subject at Boston University.
And they might, another study says, “pose a serious risk to patients” who mistakenly think, for instance, they took important medication but did not.
In Biden’s case, they might pose a serious risk to the nation.
