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Hileos <
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The Washington Post calls Joe Biden a liar.
President Biden, like many politicians, likes to tell stories —
stories that attempt to connect his life story with his
audiences and make up an essential part of his persona.
Speaking to survivors of the devastating Maui fire on Aug. 21,
Biden recalled how lightning had once struck a pond outside his
home, sparking a fire. “To make a long story short, I almost
lost my wife, my ’67 Corvette and my cat,” he said, adding, “all
kidding aside.”
But throughout his career — most famously in his first
presidential campaign, in the 1988 election cycle — Biden’s
propensity to exaggerate or embellish tales about his life led
to doubts about his truthfulness. Contemporary news reports on
the house fire do not match his telling of it, fanning criticism
that he had lied to a vulnerable audience.
“Joe Biden shared his life — or his version of it —
continuously,” wrote Richard Ben Cramer in his 1992 book, “What
It Takes,” about the 1988 campaign. “He confided it, displayed
it, spread it profligately, even expanded it to connect it with
your life. He would settle for nothing less.”
Sometimes the stories turn out to be largely true, such as the
one about a confrontation as a 19-year-old lifeguard with a gang
leader named Corn Pop. But others fall short. As president,
Biden has continued a tradition of embellishing his personal
tales in ways that cannot be verified or are directly refuted by
contemporary accounts.
“President Biden has brought honesty and integrity back to the
Oval Office,” deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates
told The Fact Checker. “Like he promised, he gives the American
people the truth right from the shoulder and takes pride in
being straight with the country about his agenda and his values;
including by sharing life experiences that have shaped his
outlook and that hard-working people relate to. And as Americans
know, there are countless moments from every person’s own
history that are not covered in local newspapers.”
Here’s an accounting of some of Biden’s favorite tales.
The tale of the fire in his house
At least six times as president, mostly recently in comments to
Hurricane Idalia victims Wednesday, Biden has exaggerated the
extent of a fire that occurred at his house in 2004.
“And I know, having had a house burn down with my wife in it —
she got out safely, God willing — that having a significant
portion of it burn, I can tell: 10 minutes makes a hell of a
difference,” Biden said at an infrastructure event in November
2021.
In March this year, speaking to a firefighters conference, Biden
said: “Lightning struck in a pond behind my house, went up
underneath the conduit, and caught the — caught fire underneath
the floorboards of my house. And it was during the summer. Air
conditioning was on. Smoke that thick all three stories.” He
added: “My fire company was there to go in and save my wife, get
her out; the cat; and my ’67 Corvette.”
Speaking to a summit on fire prevention last October, Biden
said: “We almost lost a couple firefighters, they tell me,
because the kitchen floor was — the — burning between beams in
the house, in addition to almost collapsed into the basement.”
The contemporary news accounts in the Wilmington News Journal
and the Associated Press are much less dramatic.
“Biden’s house on Barley Mill Road was reported hit by lightning
at 8:16 a.m., emergency officials said,” the News Journal
reported. “There were no injuries and firefighters kept the fire
contained to one room.” The article added that “firefighters
from Cranston Heights, Talleyville, Elsmere, Mill Creek and
Hockessin fire companies arrived to find heavy smoke coming from
the house.”
Cranston Heights Fire Co. Chief George Lamborn told the
newspaper the flames did not spread from the kitchen. “Luckily,
we got it pretty early,” he said. “The fire was under control in
20 minutes.”
At a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in 2021, Jill
Biden offered her own account. “A while back, our house was
struck by lightning and caught fire. I’ll never forget standing
in the rain, watching the firefighters try to put it out. I was
devastated,” she said. “I turned to Joe, who loved that house,
and said, ‘Joe, what are we going to do?’ And he looked back at
me with a smile and said, ‘Look at it this way — now we can fix
all of the things we didn’t like!’”
The tale of the Amtrak conductor
At least 10 times as president, most recently during an Aug. 15
speech in Milwaukee, Biden has told a heartwarming but
implausible story about an Amtrak conductor named Angelo Negri
who congratulated him for traveling more on Amtrak than he had
on Air Force planes as vice president. Biden often brings up the
anecdote when discussing infrastructure projects or speaking to
labor groups.
Biden’s tale varies slightly in each retelling. In one version,
told at a New Jersey Transit facility in October 2021, Biden
recalled: “Ang walks up to me and goes, ‘Joey, baby!’ Grabs my
cheek. And I thought the Secret Service was going to blow his
head off.” Biden said that Negri had read Biden had flown 1.2
million miles as vice president, but Negri calculated he
actually had traveled more than 2 million miles on Amtrak. “So,
Joey, I don’t want to hear this about the Air Force anymore,”
Negri allegedly said.
Often Biden adds: “True story.”
But it’s not possible this conversation took place as Biden
describes. Negri and Biden were friends, according to a CNN
interview with Negri’s stepdaughter in 2021, and she said Negri
“adored” Biden. But Biden did not pass the 1.2 million-mile mark
until 2016; Negri retired from Amtrak in 1993, 16 years before
Biden became vice president. Negri died in 2014, two years
before Biden claims they had this conversation.
In 2009, after Biden became vice president, Esquire described a
“Heeeey, Joey baby!” conversation with an unnamed conductor,
suggesting Biden may be mixing up Negri with another person.
The tale of the gay men in suits kissing
Three times this year — and at least seven times since 2014 —
Biden has told a version, most recently on Aug. 10, of a story
about words his father supposedly spoke after a teenage Biden
saw two well-dressed men in suits kiss each other in downtown
Wilmington in the early 1960s.
“Joey, it’s simple. They love each other,” Biden’s father is
said to have remarked.
Biden usually mentions this story when discussing gay issues but
there are reasons to be skeptical. Biden depicts a scene that
would have been unusual six decades ago. He describes this
exchange with his father usually as taking place in 1961. But
back then, gay men generally did not kiss in public. Many people
regarded homosexuality as deviant. Delaware’s Rehoboth Beach had
some bars regarded then as gay-friendly, but that’s not the same
as the strait-laced business community in downtown Wilmington.
Moreover, Biden’s story has evolved over time. In 2014, in a New
York Times article on his evolution on same-sex marriage, he was
the father in the story, speaking to one of his sons. In the
article, Biden’s father figures in a different story on a
similar theme — forcing a friend to apologize after insulting a
gay couple at a Delaware beach. But in 1987, Biden told the Los
Angeles Times yet another version — that his father had lectured
him after he tried to put off a visit to a gay couple who were
strong supporters of the senator and shared an apartment at a
Delaware beach.
The tale of his civil rights arrests
Biden had a tangential role in the civil rights movement — The
Fact Checker determined that he participated in one walkout at a
restaurant and picketed a segregated movie theater — and yet
sometimes he has suggested he was arrested for advocating on
behalf of Black people.
Four times, including once as president, Biden has suggested he
was arrested for standing on the porch with a Black couple who
were subject to demonstrations. Sometimes he says that his
mother warned him not to go to the protests. “Remember when I
told you not to go down there, Honey, because everybody is
protesting and you got arrested standing with the family on the
porch,” he said his mother told him, in a version he recounted
in 2017. (Twice Biden said the police merely brought him back
home from the protest after he stood on the porch.)
But when we investigated, the story did not add up. There was a
protest of a Black couple who had purchased a house in an all-
White area, but it was a neighborhood many miles from the Biden
home. Biden instead appears to be referring to a protest that
took place outside the home of the real estate agent who was
involved in the sale. That was near where he lived as a teenager
at the time.
Campaigning for president in 2020, Biden three times claimed he
was arrested in South Africa for trying to see Nelson Mandela,
who at the time was imprisoned on Robben Island, near Cape Town.
When we determined that was false, he amended his statement to
say he was “stopped” at the airport while traveling with a
congressional delegation — though others on the delegation said
that did not happen.
As president, Biden usually just comments that he tried to see
Mandela while visiting South Africa. But once he said he almost
was arrested. “Only time I almost got arrested was I was trying
to go see Nelson Mandela in South Africa and when I was at a
civil rights march,” he said at a Democratic National Committee
event in September 2022. “That was the only two times. But I
didn’t get arrested. They didn’t think I was worth it.”
The tales of a heroic uncle and the family hospital
Besides his father, Biden’s grandfather, uncle and other family
members appear as regular characters in his speeches. But some
of the stories he tells are not plausible.
Speaking to veterans in December, Biden recalled how his Uncle
Frank fought in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II and
was awarded the Purple Heart but never received it. He said that
after he became vice president in 2009, he arranged to present
the medal to his uncle with the rest of the family in
attendance. But his uncle, Frank H. Biden, died in 1999, a
decade before Biden became vice president. Neither his obituary
nor tombstone mentions a Purple Heart, awarded when a soldier is
killed or wounded while serving.
Biden had another uncle, Ambrose J. Finnegan Jr., who is listed
as missing in action during the war. Biden has described him as
being shot down during a reconnaissance flight.
Twice this year, most recently in the Milwaukee speech, Biden
has claimed his grandfather, an oil company executive, “died in
the same hospital” just before Biden himself was born there. (In
April it was two weeks before, in August it was six days.)
But Biden’s paternal grandfather, Joseph H. Biden, died at Johns
Hopkins Hospital on Sept. 26, 1941, according to an obituary.
Biden was born at St. Mary’s Hospital in Scranton, Pa., on Nov.
20, 1942, 14 months later. His maternal grandfather, Ambrose
Finnegan, did die at St. Mary’s — but in 1957, nearly 15 years
later.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/31/biden-loves- retell-certain-stories-some-arent-credible/
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