The headline at CNN has it right: “Biden still has a lot of problems as a candidate.”
Problem is, the rest of the boilerplate analysis doesn’t tell us much about Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden’s “problems,” beyond the usual abstract political calculus involving the array of victims groups that compose the Democrat “coalition.”
Yes, “issues do matter,” as CNN points out, and “we still need to hear more about what he will stand for as President.” But what if what he says is not trustworthy? Overlooked by CNN is the fact that Biden has a long history of lies and corruption that stretch back three decades to his first candidacy for president and time in the U.S. Senate.
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Prime Example
Writing at National Review, Kevin Williamson unloaded on Biden for being a “vicious partisan, a coward, and a habitual liar.”
That last observation about Biden — he lies when he feels the need — might be the most harmful. After all, it is supported by the evidence.
Example: Biden’s repeated lie that the man who survived the car crash that killed Biden’s wife and daughter was drunk. He wasn’t. Biden apologized for peddling the falsehood, as Politico reported in January last year, but Biden told the lie for years.
And that fib is just one in a long list, again, stretching back three decades.
Another more recent whopper concerns Biden’s conduct as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during confirmation hearings for U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991. When feminists viciously attacked Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh with a hurricane of lies during his hearings, Anita Hill, who accused Thomas of sexual misbehavior, joined the fight by recalling her own travails.
That, of course, required Biden to revisit the history.
“I believed her from the beginning,” Biden said on ABC’s The View. “I was against Clarence Thomas, I did everything in my power to defeat Clarence Thomas and he won by the smallest margin anyone ever won going on the Supreme Court.”
That is false. The record shows that Biden did not believe Hill. In 1998, Biden told Senator Arlen Specter exactly what he thought of Hill’s charges: “It was clear to me from the way she was answering the questions, she was lying.”
But knowing he needed the support of feminists to win the Democrat nomination, Biden tried to rewrite history.
I’m Neil Kinnock, and I Approve This Message
The above examples are merely a part of a pattern that began when Biden was in law school.
Indeed, Biden’s penchant for plagiarism, a form of academic lying, destroyed his first presidential bid in 1987. The first case involved revelations about a plagiarized article for the Fordham Law Review when he was a student at Syracuse Law School. The law school faculty concluded that Biden “used five pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution,” as the New York Times reported.
Then the Times’s Maureen Dowd exposed Biden for stealing material from British Labour leader Neil Kinnock. Biden not only ripped off one of Kinnock’s speeches but also details from his life.
Kinnock: “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys [his wife] the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because all our predecessors were thick?’’
Biden: ‘“Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I’m the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?’’
And that’s just a sample of the material Biden stole.
After those revelations forced Biden out of the race for the Democrat nomination, he returned to the Senate to destroy the Supreme Court nomination of federal judge Robert Bork.
Biden-Burisma and More
Aside from Biden’s long, incontrovertible record as a prodigious prevaricator, other difficulties on the road to the White House abound:
• the Biden-Burisma influence peddling scandal;
• his creepy interactions with girls and women;
• his praise for Southern senators now denounced virulent racists;
• his past penchant for gaffes that become scare-quote headlines; and
• his current troubles with gaffes that might indicate the onset of dementia.
Given his smashing success on Super Tuesday, Democrats might believe Biden has rescued them from certain defeat on November 3 by seizing control of the presidential race from Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist who appeared unstoppable after three wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.
But now they must deal with Biden’s record, and the inevitable campaign ads that will highlight it.
Photo of Joe Biden: AP Images
R. Cort Kirkwood is a longtime contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
