The liar in chief
“No man,” said Abraham Lincoln, “has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.”
Sadly, that excellent piece of indisputable presidential wisdom hasn’t filtered down to the current occupant of the White House.
Joe Biden is a terrible liar in every sense; he lies on a terrible scale, and he’s terrible at lying.
And as much as I’d like to be kind to an old man and put his constant untrue statements down to memory issues caused by his advanced age and cognitive decline, it’s not because of that at all.
No, President Biden just likes to tell humongous self-promoting whoppers, again and again and again.
He’s done it his entire political life, and now he’s lying so often and so badly that even his most diehard uncritical supporters can’t excuse him anymore.
CNN, my former employer, has bent over into positions even the Kama Sutra hasn’t thought of in a concerted effort to paint Biden as a beacon of honesty sent to rescue America from fork-tongued Donald Trump.
But even CNN’s given up.
Last week, after Biden brazenly and shamefully lied about being at Ground Zero the day after 9/11, CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale unleashed a devastating critique that directly accused the president of having an “unfortunate pattern, at this point, of either inventing or embellishing stories about his own past, his biography — he did it three times in one speech last month alone!”
Dale then cited a long list of Biden’s lies, which included him claiming to have witnessed the collapse of a bridge in Pittsburgh last year when it collapsed hours before he arrived in the city; claiming to have visited a synagogue in the same city after worshippers were killed in a mass shooting in 2018 when he was never there at all; and claiming his grandfather died a few days before he was born at the same hospital when in fact he’d died a year before at a different hospital in a different state.
There were just two problems with Dale’s sudden come-to-veracity moment of awakening about Biden’s propensity for lying.
First, he couldn’t bring himself to use the word “lie” despite regularly calling Donald Trump a liar during his tenure as president.
Second, by using the qualifying words “at this point,” he suggests this is some new habit Biden’s only recently developed.
It’s not.
He’s always done it.
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Politicians sometimes lie for self-glorification and other times they do so defensively. Biden seems to do it more routinely for both reasons.
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