For almost three-quarters of a century, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union operated the newspaper Pravda – ironic as the name meant “truth” and it contained anything but. Back then, Americans could recognize fake news when they saw it, dismissing Pravda for what it was: Soviet propaganda.
It seems much more difficult for Americans to discern fake news here at home. One politician recognizing this shortcoming and taking advantage of it for nearly half a century is Joe Biden. In fact, he first tested the waters for pushing false narratives when running for office in 1972. Despite his upper-class upbringing, he campaigned as one who grew up in a blue-collar family. It was the start of a Pinocchio nose mindset that only grew over time.
In 1972, Biden was a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Delaware. Only 29 years old on Election Day but required to be 30 to take office, he would turn 30 before taking the oath in January 1973. Despite trailing the Republican incumbent at one time by 30 points, Biden miraculously won the seat in an upset victory.
Sadly, Biden’s euphoria over his political victory was short-lived due to a family tragedy occurring in December 1972. His wife Neilia and three children (two sons and a daughter) were involved in a car crash. Neilia and his daughter were immediately killed, but his sons survived when their car was hit by a truck driven by Curtiss C. Dunn.
For years, Biden told the story that Neilia and his daughter were killed by a “guy who allegedly … drank his lunch” before getting behind the wheel of his truck that fatal day. In 2001, a television show aired a segment in which Biden again claimed Dunn had “stopped to drink instead of drive.” The story was repeated, unchallenged, by several media outlets.
Despite Biden’s claim family members were killed by a drunk driver, no evidence of this exists. Not only did evidence show no basis for charging Dunn with being drunk but no basis of responsibility for the accident. Jerome O. Herlihy – now a Delaware Superior Court judge who was chief deputy attorney general working with crash investigators on the case at the time – reported later: “The rumor about alcohol being involved by either party, especially the truck driver, is incorrect.” In fact, a local newspaper reported Neilia may have been distracted by her kids, failing to stop at a stop sign and pulling out directly in front of the truck. Herlihy left no room for debate: Biden’s wife “had a stop sign. The truck driver did not. In the end, I concurred in their decision that there was no fault on his (Dunn’s) part.”
In fact, Dunn tried to do everything he could at the time to avoid the collision, causing his own truck to overturn. Yet, his immediate concern was for the Biden car as he scrambled out of his truck to render assistance at the scene – not an act of an inebriated driver.
Despite this, the liberal media have promoted Biden’s drunk driving story. After NPR did so, it later felt compelled to publish a correction, noting there was absolutely “no evidence that the driver was drunk.”
Yet a shameless Biden never hesitated to tell the drunk driver version of his story whenever politically expedient to do so – as he did at the University of Iowa when running for president in 1988. He told it without any concern for the negative light into which it put the truck driver. Dunn, distraught over the deaths despite not being legally responsible for them, went to his grave in 1999 bearing Biden’s drunk driver label.
After Biden became Barack Obama’s running mate in 2008, the drunk driving story gained traction. One of Dunn’s children, Pamela Hamill, was livid. She went public declaring, “The story already is tragic enough; why did he have to sensationalize it by saying my father was drunk? My family is outraged.”
Biden has found fertile ground for his lies and exaggerations due to a supportive liberal media. Interestingly, however, his 1988 presidential campaign was derailed after he gave a plagiarized speech in Iowa. Biden received kudos for it, especially its ending providing “an emotional invocation of his coal-mining ancestors.” However, the rival campaign of Democrat Michael Dukakis leaked a tape proving Biden had simply told a story given by a British politician about his own family – a family Biden apparently “adopted” as his own in his speech.
Biden also claimed to have graduated in the top half of his law school class when, in fact, he graduated near the bottom (76 of 85). Additionally, he has falsely reported numerous times he was arrested in the 1970s in South Africa while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison. As a senator at the time, the event would have made national news, but no record of it appears.
Biden constantly tells “whoppers” to falsely promote himself including: twice claiming, as vice president, he had met with Parkland, Florida, shooting survivors (he was out of office when it occurred); his helicopter was “forced down” near Osama bin Laden’s Afghanistan lair; being shot at while in Iraq; calling Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic “a damn war criminal” to his face; criticizing President George W. Bush during lengthy private Oval Office meetings that never occurred; participating in sit-ins at segregated restaurants in the 1970s/80s as a civil rights activist; etc.
Just this week, Biden told another whopper after disparaging blacks whom he claims fail to think as diversely as Latinos do. Obviously seeking to regain black support he may have lost, he used the sixth anniversary (Aug. 9) of black suspect Michael Brown’s shooting death in Ferguson, Missouri, by white police officer Darren Wilson to suggest Brown was an innocent victim. Not only had Brown just stolen items from a store causing Wilson to stop him as a suspect, but Brown then fought him for his gun. Two independent investigations concluded Wilson acted in self-defense.
Today, the liberal media still seems willing to turn a blind eye to Biden’s mistruths. They excuse Biden, 77, of telling his outrageous lies and exaggerations as comments by a confused elderly politician rather than by a politician who has a long-established career built upon falsehoods.
A near half-century of lies and mistruths has left Biden with a nose that would tip Pinocchio over. Biden failed to select Sen. Elizabeth Warren as his running mate, but the combination of a Pinocchio-Pocahontas ticket would have even make editors of Pravda proud!
