AMAC Exclusive – By Aaron Flanigan
Last week, the Biden administration released a 12-page report that remarkably blamed former President Donald Trump for the botched U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan—even though Trump had left office a full seven months before the ill-fated operation. But although attempting to rewrite history on the Afghanistan fiasco undoubtedly exists as one of the most egregious instances of Joe Biden’s existence in an alternate reality, it is hardly the only instance.
In fact, for as long as Joe Biden has been in elected office, he has engaged in a staggering pattern of dishonesty, putting his own self-interest, political ambitions, and financial security above his duty to the American people and the conduct expected of a public servant.
This behavior has often manifested in puzzling—and even bizarre—ways that raise significant questions about Biden’s character. But they can also help us to better understand the dishonesty Biden peddles from the White House to this very day.
Another outrageous example of Biden’s sleazy behavior dates back to the 1970s, when Biden’s first wife tragically died in a car accident. Ever since his wife’s death, traumatizing though it may have been, Biden has repeatedly embellished details of the story for dramatic effect—most notably, accusing the driver of the other car of being drunk.
In reality, the driver was not drunk and likely was not even at fault for the accident. As Kevin Williamson wrote about the incident, “The driver of that truck went to his grave haunted by Biden’s lies, to the point where his children were forced to beg the vice president to stop defaming their late father.”
“The casual cruelty,” Kevin Williamson wrote, “with which Biden is willing to subordinate the lives of ordinary people to his political ambitions—for the sake of a petty tear-jerker line in one of his occasionally plagiarized stump speeches—is remarkable.”
Biden’s behavior doesn’t get better from there. During his failed 1988 presidential campaign—his first run for the White House—Biden infamously plagiarized lengthy portions of speeches from British politician Neil Kinnock in his own campaign speeches, including elements of Kinnock’s personal background and upbringing (such as Kinnock’ family’s history in the mining industry).
The year prior, in 1987, Biden also ripped off lines from a 1968 Robert Kennedy speech, again without citing or attributing the comments to their original source—and later claimed he had no idea that the same lines he used had been used by Kennedy. He also stole lines from President Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address and plagiarized passages written by former Senator Hubert Humphrey.
“Hell, I might be president now if it weren’t for the fact I said I had an uncle who was a coal miner. Turns out I didn’t have anybody in the coal mines, you know what I mean?” Biden conceded in a 2004 interview. He added revealingly: “I tried that crap—it didn’t work.”
Biden’s long streak of dishonesty, however, did not begin during his time in politics.
As a first-year law student, Biden plagiarized several law review articles, and repeatedly lied about his law school grades. Despite having graduated 76th in a class of 85, Biden insisted on the campaign trail during his first White House run that he graduated “in the top half of [his] class.”
Biden’s shameless dishonesty has continued through his 2020 campaign and into his presidency. During the 2020 Democrat primaries, the Biden campaign openly acknowledged they had stolen policy language from left-wing advocacy groups. Additionally, in January 2022, Biden falsely claimed he was “arrested” during a civil rights protest, something for which even Washington Post fact-checkers granted him four “Pinocchios.”
And as recently as March of this year, Biden weirdly claimed he had experienced an “epiphany” on the issue of same-sex “marriage” during his time as a high school student. “I remember I was about to get out of the car and I look to my right and two well-dressed men in suits kissed each other… And I’ll never forget it, I turned and looked at my dad and he said, ‘Joey, it’s simple. They love each other,’” he said in an interview.
However, Biden’s voting record as a senator shows no signs of this so-called “epiphany.” In 1996, Biden voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman. He also supported a legislative measure to cut funds to schools that promoted homosexuality. As recently as 2006, Biden had told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “Marriage is between a man and a woman.”
Evidently, even after all these years, Biden still has a knack for contriving falsehoods out of thin air.
But despite all this, in his many decades as a politician, Biden has faced no consequences for his lies. In fact, he appears to have learned early on that he can say whatever he wants with impunity.
Is it any wonder that the same man who fabricated accounts of his upbringing made up a story about being arrested and routinely plagiarized other politicians’ speeches has also lied about his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and his record on border security, among countless other barefaced falsehoods?
In the end, Biden’s lack of consequences for his mountain of fibs and fabrications has cemented his legacy as a serial liar with the mindset of a criminal who believes he can get away with anything, so long as the media and his political allies dutifully cover his tracks. His escape from punishment has made him wholly unaccountable to the truth and increasingly divorced from reality. The man is now willing to say pretty anything, so long as it serves his immediate needs.
In this sense, ironically, Biden is the perfect avatar for the modern American left, which rejects reality in favor of a utopian commitment to uprooting human nature, abolishing capitalism, “reimagining” law enforcement, and saving the planet by way of eating insects. The Radical Left is on a railcar speeding away from reality into an abyss of lies—and the Democrat Party could not possibly ask for a better conductor than Joe Biden.
What Biden—and the left itself—will someday inevitably realize, however, is that no matter how hard they try to escape the confines of reality, they cannot, and will not, outrun the truth.
Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.
