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Biden’s whoppers

Conservatives looked forward to Joe Biden’s characteristic gaffes in the vice presidential candidates’ debate on Thursday night. We didn’t get them. Instead, Biden served up a panoply of what I’ll call — in the interest of civility — whoppers. Some of the whoppers are shameful. If we had a free press, one or more of these whoppers would lead the news until next week’s presidential debate. They would be deemed to raise a profound questions of the man’s fitness for office, let alone the presidency. I want to itemize four of these whoppers:


This whopper earned a rebuke for its falsity from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Has that ever before happened in American history? Here is how the bishops tactfully put it:



“This is not a fact.” Considering the source, this is an incredibly damning judgment.

2. Biden said: “[The recession] came from this man [Ryan] voting to put two wars on a credit card, at the same time, put a prescription drug plan on the credit card, a trillion dollar tax cut for the very wealthy….I was there, I voted against them. I said, no, we can’t afford that.” Biden voted for the authorization for the use of force in Afghanistan and the Iraq authorization in October 2002. Neither the Bush tax cuts nor the Medicare prescription drug plan had anything to do with the recession. The Obama administration agreed to keep the Bush tax cuts in place for the same reason that Bush originally proposed them. This is pure blather.

3. Biden said: “[T]hat’s exactly what we were told…by the intelligence community. The intelligence community told us that [the Bengahazi assault arose from protests outside the consulate]. As they learned more facts about exactly what happened, they changed their assessment.” The falsity of this statement requires only a close reading of what administration officials have said heretofore and a look at the timeline of available information (compiled here by Steve Hayes). This particular whopper only contributes to an ongoing scandal, as does number 4.

4. “Well, we weren’t told they wanted more security [in Benghazi] again.” Coming a day after the sworn testimony of State Department security officers powerfully to the contrary, this whopper requires a saving construction: “We” means Obama and Biden. This statement, whopper or not, raises the question: Where does the buck stop?

These seem to me the most consequential of Biden’s whoppers, though it does not exhaust the list of Biden’s whoppers including the assertion that Ryan and House Republicans “cut” embassy security by $300 million, that Biden heard about “death panels” in his debate with Sarah Palin in 2008, or that Syria is five times as large as Libya.

I said at the top that these whoppers raise a profound question of Biden’s fitness for office. In my view, they also answer it.

Hat tip: Andrew Stiles/Joel Pollak.

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