Ladies and gentlemen, we may have a new winner in the sweepstakes for the most creative, verbally byzantine way to say Joe Biden is lying without saying he’s lying.
This, like Ron Burgundy, is kind of a big deal. In fact, nobody’s really managed to best The Atlantic’s Mark Bowden for 13 years; back in a 2010 profile of the then-vice president which pointed out the many, many lies of Joseph Robinette Biden, Bowden politely said he “has the limber storyteller’s tendency to stretch.”
Right. There isn’t a yogi in India limber enough to make that metaphor work.
The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler doesn’t quite have the skill of verbal blandishment that Mr. Bowden does, but the paper’s chief “fact-checker” (imagine me on the other end of the screen putting the most emphatic air-quotes you’ve ever seen around that compound word and you can get an idea of how ludicrous I believe that title to be) is fantastic, when a Democrat is involved, at “checking” a fact and softening the language around it so that — even if it’s a lie of Brobdingnagian proportions — it sounds like the most innocent of mistakes.
So, dear reader, steel yourself for this Kessler “fact-check” headline and try not to laugh: “Biden loves to retell certain stories. Some aren’t credible.”
This “fact-check” came after the president finally visited the fire-devastated Hawaiian island of Maui, where, as Kessler noted, “Biden recalled how lightning had once struck a pond outside his home, sparking a fire. ‘To make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my ’67 Corvette and my cat,’ he said, adding, ‘all kidding aside.’”
Now, let’s forget about the propriety of talking about maybe losing your Corvette and your cat when, as of Wednesday, 115 people were confirmed dead in the Lahaina fires and an unknown number were still missing, according to USA Today. Not only was it insensitive, it was also a lie.
“Contemporary news reports on the house fire do not match his telling of it, fanning criticism that he had lied to a vulnerable audience,” Kessler wrote.
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As Kessler went on to note, Biden tends to try and tell stories that too-neatly connect with certain audiences.
“Sometimes the stories turn out to be largely true, such as the one about a confrontation as a 19-year-old lifeguard with a gang leader named Corn Pop. But others fall short,” Kessler wrote. “As president, Biden has continued a tradition of embellishing his personal tales in ways that cannot be verified or are directly refuted by contemporary accounts.”
That emphasis is mine. That’s the new winner. Move over, “limber storyteller’s tendency to stretch.” Biden likes “embellishing his personal tales in ways that cannot be verified or are directly refuted by contemporary accounts.”
Which is also called, in less verbose, deliberately tortuous terms, lying.
Twitter was not impressed with this linguistic prestidigitation on Kessler’s part:
— The Right To Bear Memes (@grandoldmemes) August 31, 2023
They never, ever, use their favorite word: “lies”.
— The Fall Of Rome (@LaCadutaDiRoma) August 31, 2023
So hard-hitting! Way to go after a pathological liar who is somehow the President of the United States!
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) August 31, 2023
Biden doesn’t “lie,” according to fact checkers.
He tells stories that cannot be verified or are not plausible.
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) August 31, 2023
Kessler’s article, to be fair, does go on to document plenty of the lies — albeit without ever using the word “lie,” “lies” or “lying.” (The only time it was used in the article, in fact, was that part about “fanning criticism that he had lied to a vulnerable audience.”)
So there was the tale about the fire at his house. Lie: Virtually every contemporary source indicates it was a minor fire that Biden has constantly exaggerated about.
There was the tale about the Amtrak conductor named Angelo Negri who told Biden he had traveled more on trains than he had on Air Force Two as vice president. Lie: While Kessler called it “heartwarming but implausible,” it’s so implausible that it beggars belief, since Negri retired from Amtrak in 1993 and had passed away by the time the story allegedly took place.
Then there was the story about seeing two gay men kissing in downtown Wilmington, Delaware in the 1960s and his father telling him, “Joey, it’s simple. They love each other.” Lie: Not only would this be highly unlikely to have happened in “the strait-laced business community in downtown Wilmington,” Kessler notes that “Biden’s story has evolved over time.” Which is to say it’s been a different lie each time, but still almost certainly a lie.
Biden’s arrest in apartheid South Africa? Lie. His involvement in the civil rights movement? Lie. Tales about his relatives’ heroism in the war? Lies.
And these are the lies Kessler mentions. He’s omitting the ones about Joe being a truck driver, about a comment in Idaho about receiving his “first job offer” from local lumber company Boise Cascade, about his academic record, about being “raised in the black church” — you know, those sorts of things.
Also curiously unmentioned: something we now know is almost certainly a lie, Joe’s claim he never talked to his son Hunter about his overseas business dealings. Not only do we know he talked about them with Hunter, according to testimony from Hunter’s former business partner, Devon Archer, he talked with the overseas business connections on roughly two dozen phone calls Archer was present for.
But that’s Joe for you — “embellishing his personal tales in ways that cannot be verified or are directly refuted by contemporary accounts.” Or, in non-Kesslerian terminology, lying.
