Eliana Johnson reports that Newark, NJ mayor and Democrat Senate candidate Cory Booker has been telling a tall tale at campaign events for years.
[S]ources tell National Review Online that the central character in one of Booker’s oft-repeated stories — T-Bone, the drug pusher who the mayor has said threatened his life at one turn and sobbed on his shoulder the next — is a figment of his imagination, even though Booker has talked about him in highly emotional terms and in great detail.
The tale is one Booker admits he’s told “a million” times, according to the Newark Star Ledger. Ronald Rice Jr., a Newark city councilman and Booker ally who has known the mayor since 1998, says the T-Bone story was “a fixture” of Booker’s unsuccessful 2002 mayoral bid against corrupt Newark political boss Sharpe James, perhaps for its symbolic value. In Booker’s mind, according to the city councilman, “It’s not so much the details of the story” that matter, but the principle that “these things happen, they happen to real people, they happen in the city of Newark.” Rice, a Newark native, says he doesn’t know whether T-Bone exists. But, he explains, “if Cory had to tell a story or two and mix details up for Newark to get the funding for it, I see that as something that’s taking tragedy and doing something productive for it.”
Booker is far from alone among Democrats who have embellished or outright lied to puff up themselves and their resumes.
1. Saving Private Clinton. As a candidate for the presidency, then Sen. Hillary Clinton claimed that when visiting war-torn Bosnia in 1996, she came under sniper fire. The truth: Reporters who accompanied her on that trip say there was no sniper fire at all. ABC even ridiculed Clinton for claiming that there was.
Do you see any snipers?
2. Joe Biden, British populist. Vice President Joe Biden ran for president in 1988. He was a senator from Delaware at the time. He was also a plagiarist — he got caught lifting not just rhetoric, but pretty much the entire life story of British Labour politician Neil Kinnock for his own campaign speeches. Biden had to quit that race in disgrace, but unfortunately, in Democrat politics, disgrace is rarely permanent.
Trust him. He lifts material from the best sources.
3. Barack Obama, plagiarist and fabulist. Barack Obama’s plagiarism was not as shameless or extensive as Biden’s, but it still would get anyone into trouble either in an academic or journalistic setting. Obama borrowed his famous “just words” speech riff from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. The true author of that speech is neither Obama nor Patrick, but Democrat operative David Axelrod, who advises both. Obama has also admitted that some of the people in his allegedly non-fiction autobiographies are “composite” characters, meaning, they do not exist.
Just words…just not his words.
4. Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the war hero who never actually saw war. The Democrat has long claimed that his experience serving in Vietnam colors his politics. But the claim cannot be true, as records shows that he never actually served in Vietnam at all. The New York Times reported, before he was elected to the Senate in 2010, that Blumenthal obtained five deferments to avoid serving in the war.
Stolen valor.
Voters still elected Blumenthal to the Senate, have elected Obama to the presidency twice along with Biden to the vice presidency, and still think highly of Private Clinton. If that’s anything to go by, Booker could add an entire family tree for T-Bone and it won’t hurt him a bit.
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