During an online campaign event on Wednesday, Democrat presidential frontrunner Joe Biden took questions from members of the audience. To ingratiate himself with the students present, he said, “When I left the United States Senate, I became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. And I’ve spent a lot of time … on campus with college students.”
The facts are different. He left the Senate in 2009. It wasn’t until 2017 that the university granted him the honorary title of Benjamin Franklin presidential practice professor. He was never expected to teach. And he never did. On occasion he would appear on campus at a rally or a ticketed event.
This is the most recent example of the lies that Biden has used repeatedly to build his self-importance, self-image, and credibility among people who don’t know better.
Examples abound:
• Early on, he bragged about graduating in the top half of his class at law school. He actually graduated 76th in a class of 85 at the Syracuse College of Law.
• He claimed that his helicopter was forced down near Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Afghanistan. His helicopter was actually forced to land in order to wait out a sudden snowstorm.
• He claimed to be a “hard-coal” miner in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 2008. But in 2004, four years earlier, he told Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, “I didn’t have anybody [in my family who worked] in the coal mines.”
• More recently, he claimed that he met twice with survivors of the Parkland, Florida, shooting while he was vice president, despite the fact that the shooting took place a year after he left office.
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• Last summer, he recalled an incident where he displayed his personal courage and heroism in travelling to a dangerous war zone in order to recognize the service of an American soldier. That soldier had distinguished himself by retrieving the body of another soldier under heavy fire. When Biden was about to pin the Silver Star on the soldier for his bravery, he recalled that the soldier said, “I don’t want [it]! Do not pin it on me, sir! Please, sir. Do not do that! He died. He died!” “This is the God’s truth,” said Biden. “My word as a Biden.” The Washington Post checked into the story and reported, “In the space of three minutes Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch, and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.”
• Perhaps most egregious is the story Biden continues to tell long after the event, and his explanation of what happened, has been fully exposed. In December 1972, he learned of the death of his first wife and 13-month-old daughter in a car accident. Biden’s explanation is that “a tractor-trailer, a guy who allegedly — and I never pursued it — drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly and killed my daughter instantly and hospitalized my two sons.” When the Newark Post looked into it, they reported that the judge who oversaw the investigation, Jerome Herlihy, said, “The rumor about alcohol being involved by either party, especially the truck driver, is incorrect.” The Post explained what really happened: “Biden’s first wife drove into the path of Dunn’s tractor-trailer, possibly because her head was turned and she didn’t see the oncoming truck.… Police filed no charges against Dunn.”
This reveals more than just a penchant for lying to build his own image and credibility with others less informed. Elizabeth Vaughn, writing at Red State, said that Biden “has a history of embellishing events which have occurred and occasionally inventing entire stories out of whole cloth if it serves his purpose.”
It’s evidence of a pathology. Brandon Brewer, the COO of Gooden Center, a residential rehabilitation center in Los Angeles, explains,
Lies can be driven by the need for approval and to seem like someone else because they fear their own true self is unworthy. Essentially, their lies have an internal rather than an external motivation. Their lies can sometimes have truthful elements but they invent them without thinking and can get carried away by their own stories.
This is a pathology, wrote Brewer:
When an average person lies, they usually have a specific motive for doing so. However, a pathological liar will lie constantly, without reason or any immediate pressure that is causing them to lie. It is known in the mental health field as intentional dissimulation, and it can have a range of diagnoses such as anti-social, narcissistic or borderline personality disorder.
Biden isn’t promoting a particular ideology with his lies, but they are instead reflecting a disorder that, coupled with what some suspect is the early onset of Alzheimer’s, not only disqualifies him for the presidency but is making the hierarchy of the Democrat Party increasingly nervous.
Photo: Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American, writing primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
