It must be nice to be president. Every time you open your mouth, the world hangs on every word you utter.
“Ev’ry word that I speak goes in the headlines; When I speak, all the papers hold their deadlines,” penned Richard Rodgers and Moss Hart in their musical about FDR, ‘I’d Rather Be Right.” It must be a heady experience for a president.
The temptation to just make stuff up must be overwhelming. And for Joe Biden, he seems particularly unable to resist the temptation to exaggerate, glorify, prevaricate, and “get creative with the truth.”
He’s already tried to make a war hero out of his son, who died of brain cancer. During a speech dedicating a World War II military base as a national monument, Biden said: “Just imagine, I mean it sincerely, I say this as a father of a man who won the Bronze Star, the conspicuous service medal, and lost his life in Iraq. Imagine the courage, the daring, and the genuine sacrifice—genuine sacrifice they all made.”
On Wednesday, Biden claimed that his uncle Ambrose Finnegan crashed on an island in New Guinea and was eaten by cannibals.
“He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals at the time,” Biden initially told reporters. He was visiting a war memorial in his hometown of Scranton, Pa., that bears his uncle’s name.
“They never recovered his body, but the government went back when I went down there and they checked and found some parts of the plane.”
It’s a good story. Too bad it’s not even close to the truth.
The Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency says that Finnegan’s plane actually was lost over the open ocean on May 14, 1944.
“For unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea. Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard,” the military’s account says.
“Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash. One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge. An aerial search the next day found no trace of the missing aircraft or the lost crew members.”
Exclusively for our VIPs: Biden’s Cognitive Decline Is Becoming More Obvious
Back aboard Air Force One, the president’s exhausted damage control team trotted out press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who was forced to make the rather embarrassing correction.
“You saw the president, he was incredibly proud of his uncle’s service in uniform. You saw him at the War Memorial. It was incredibly emotional and important to him,” Jean-Pierre said en route to Philadelphia.
“You saw him respond to all of you when asked about the moment yesterday and his uncle who lost his life when the military aircraft he was on crashed in the Pacific after taking off near New Guinea.”
Yes. And we also saw Biden try to tell us that his uncle was a two-course meal for cannibals.
Biden has a long history of telling provably false personal anecdotes, or dubious tales for which there is no documentation, in an attempt to connect to his audiences — in this case, Pennsylvania voters who could determine the outcome of his bid for a second term against former President Donald Trump.
Next, he’s going to tell us his grandmother operated the Underground Railroad.