A crazy thing happened on the way to the glue factory. George Clooney, the New York Times editorial board, and other truly powerful Democrats allowed the president of the United States to say goodbye before he reincarnated inside a squeeze bottle of Elmer’s.
A glassy-eyed and marble-mouthed Joe Biden told the nation from the Oval Office on Wednesday that he “cherry that cause” of democracy and that he planned to “keep keep speaking out.” The line, “We finally beat Big Pharma,” told viewers without telling them that he meant to say just that when he strangely spoke about defeating Medicare during June’s politically fatal debate with Donald Trump. Similarly, he never explicitly said why he dropped out of the presidential race. He did not need to. His mechanical, albeit in a rumble-seat jalopy way, reading of the speech told everyone why without telling anyone why.
He claimed, “I’ve decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation.” He did not decide this. A bunch of people with impressive bank accounts and unfamiliar names did.
Yes, a man who said a sober truck driver “drank his lunch” before the fatal crash that killed his daughter and wife and maintained that his son “lost his life in Iraq” when he died of brain cancer in Maryland six years after his service abroad ended also lied about the manner of death of his political career.
He also invented a preposterous creation story of meeting his second wife, which supposedly involved a chance sighting of a beautiful woman in an airport advertisement leading to a date to see A Man and a Woman, a movie about a widower given a second chance at love, which in turn led to marriage. In reality, according Jill Biden’s former husband, they met while the very married Jill volunteered for his campaign (and presumably much else).
In 1987, he falsely told a New Hampshire voter asking about his credentials that he won “the outstanding student in the political science department” at the University of Delaware, where he “graduated with three degrees,” before going “to law school on a full academic scholarship” and finishing “in the top half.”
He expropriated the life story of British politician Neil Kinnock by claiming, in plagiarizing nearly verbatim Kinnock’s stump speech from the same year, that “my ancestors who worked in the coal mines in northeastern Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours,” exposure of which forced a 1987 exit from the 1988 presidential race.
He recounted holding “the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see” Nelson Mandela. This never happened.
He repeatedly claimed that he logged more miles on Amtrak than on Air Force 2, which would mean a million miles on the train service (or Washington to Wilmington every day for a quarter century). The Amtrak employee who Biden insisted told him this retired in the early 1990s and died before the then-vice president hit the million mark on Air Force 2.
Joe Biden never drove a tractor trailer for a living, never experienced his house burning down with his wife in it, and never played football for the University of Delaware.
“When you elected me to this office, I promised to always level with you, to tell you the truth,” Biden told the American people on Wednesday. “And the truth, the sacred cause of this country, is larger than any one of us.”
Indeed, it is. But Joe Biden, who stands out as a liar in a profession known for them, has never conducted himself in a way that suggests that he believes that. This seems especially applicable to his continued, unsubtle framing of the upcoming election as a choice between democracy and dictatorship even as he, in the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, exhorts listeners to “see those we disagree with not as enemies but as fellow Americans.”
The latter followed from the former not logically but as self-absolution. He, or his speechwriters, want the cake and to eat it too, i.e., they want to affix the nastiest political swearwords to their enemy (fascist, dictator, authoritarian, etc.) without taking responsibility for how such demagoguery inspires the feeble-minded or feeble-souled. One can only call someone Hitler so many times before someone acts upon the information.
“America’s going to have to choose between moving forward and backward, between hope and hate, between unity and division,” the octogenarian warned Wednesday. In turning away from his candidacy, maybe America already has.
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