Is there something in the water at the Washington Post? First they wondered if the FBI’s hyper-partisan raid on James O’Keefe was a bridge too far and a threat to the First Amendment, and now the Post’s fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, of all people, has caught our mendacious alleged Commander-in-Chief adding yet another lie to his half-century of half-truths, distortions, and cynical bending of the facts.
On Tuesday, Kessler tweeted: “Biden today: We ‘had a house burn down with my wife in it. She got out safely.’ 2004 AP news report: ‘A small fire that was contained to the kitchen….Jill reported the fire…The fire was under control in 20 minutes.’”
That’s right. What was a “small fire” in 2004 has now become an entire house burning down, in line with Biden’s other recent lies about being arrested in South Africa while trying to visit Nelson Mandela, and about visiting the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh after the shooting there in 2018, and so very much more.
As Matt Margolis pointed out here at PJ Media in September, lying is the one constant of his political career, and even the most maudlin and heart-tugging stories about his personal life are inventions. “When it comes to his life story,” Matt noted, “no lie is too low. Not even the car accident that claimed the lives of his wife and infant daughter was immune to Biden’s fictionalizations. For years, Biden has claimed that the accident was caused by a drunk driver. In actuality, police had determined at the time that Biden’s first wife Neilia had driven into the path of the oncoming truck, probably because she’d been looking the wrong way at a stop sign. Pamela Hamill, the daughter of the other driver in the accident, has asked Biden to publicly apologize for lying about her father.”
Biden never did apologize, of course. Amiable old good-natured Joe is just a front. The clear evidence from his endless political career is that any lie will serve if it helps to further his political ambitions. Even his supposed blue-collar origins have come in for this mythologization: when Old Joe was Young Joe and running hard for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, long before he developed the “stutter” that allegedly accounts for his cognitive misfires and constant verbal slipups, he leaned heavily on his working-class roots.
In Sept. 1987, he delivered a speech that mixed class warfare rhetoric with his own experiences, and those of his family: “Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Why is it that my wife… is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? …Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come after 12 hours and play football for four hours? It’s because they didn’t have a platform on which to stand.”
Related: Fact-Checking Biden’s Address: Lies, Damned Lies, and the White House Teleprompter
Stirring stuff, except that Biden had lifted it from a speech by British Labour leader Neil Kinnock, who had said: “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn’t get what we had because they didn’t have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.”
Back in those days, this record of dishonesty torpedoed Biden’s presidential campaign. But now, the public discourse has degenerated to the extent that most of the establishment media does everything it can to cover for Old Joe, no matter how wildly false his statements are, with the notable exception of Kessler, who in February 2020 termed his Mandela arrest claim “ridiculous.”
Still, it is odd that the Post would go off the reservation twice in the space of a few days, first to warn that the administration’s actions against James O’Keefe may be illegal and unconstitutional, and now to catch Biden in his latest lie. Is the Post maneuvering for the dumpster fire that is the Biden presidency to be finally given the fire hose, and replaced by what is likely to be an even more disastrous Kamala Harris presidency? That could be. Or maybe the Post is just trying to hoodwink a few more rubes into believing that it’s still an actual news outlet. Either way, Biden’s house really didn’t burn down in 2004, although metaphorically, his house is certainly burning down now, and we are all paying the price for that.
