I know that my friend, David Strom, gave this latest Biden gaffetasm a bit of a light touch, but I’m going to give you a little more detail on the story, and the context behind the rest of the President’s time in Pennsylvania over the last couple days, and why none of this is okay.
Joe Biden left his debacle of a Scranton appearance on Wednesday and flew into Pittsburgh. But before Air Force One went wheels up on the tarmac in his hometown, the one he had trouble naming, along with its mayor, Biden told a weird story about his Uncle Ambrose Finnegan.
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Uncle Bosie, as he is allegedly referred to in the Biden family, was a brave hero that served in the U.S. Air Corps, being that the Air Force wouldn’t come into official existence for six more years. Here’s Biden talking about 2nd Lt. Ambrose Finnegan.
He followed that up in short order at a speech to the United Steelworkers Union in Pittsburgh, again telling the Uncle Bosie story, according to the enfeebled mind of Joe Biden.
Now I’m sure that Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler believes he’s got a lifetime hall pass from ever having to give the Pinocchio once-over to statements by this President again after giving him an endless Pinocchio rating for the phony deficit reduction lie. But since Kessler most likely won’t dive into this event, here’s what you need to know and why it’s important.
According to Biden, Uncle Bosie and his three brothers volunteered on Sunday, the day after D-Day. D-Day was on a Tuesday. The day after would be a Wednesday. Uncle Bosie and his brother, John, both enlisted on the same day – January 21st, 1942, a Wednesday. Now you might want to give the President the benefit of the doubt and say he meant to say they signed up after Pearl Harbor, not D-Day. The attack on Pearl Harbor happened on December 7th, 1941, the day that lives in infamy. That day was indeed on a Sunday. Even if Biden meant his uncles signed up the day after Pearl Harbor, that would have been a Monday. Instead, two of his four uncles signed up for service a month and a half later. And to close the loop on the timeline in Joe Biden’s mind that cannot be plotted without forming a circle, Ambrose Finnegan’s plane was lost at sea on May 14th, 1944. D-Day, of course, was June 6th, 1944, three weeks later. As with all of Biden’s memories, the chronology simply doesn’t work. It never does.
As a footnote on the service of his four uncles, Biden claims all four enlisted the day after D-Day. Two of the four did enlist three years prior to D-Day. One tried to enlist but was turned away, and the fourth died in 1950 without any mention of military service at all in his obituary, and there is no record of his military service. So the “all four uncles” bit is almost certainly untrue.
Biden may be trying to say that his uncles enlisted the Monday after Pearl Harbor (Sunday, December 7, 1941), but that is also not true.
Ambrose Finnegan and John Finnegan both enlisted on January 21, 1942, six weeks after the attack.
He claims that his mother’s other two… pic.twitter.com/exGCBonEB1
— Zach Parkinson (@AZachParkinson) April 17, 2024
Joe Biden claims Uncle Ambrose flew single engine planes. The reality is 2nd Lt. Ambrose Finnegan was a ground crew member and an ordinance officer, not a pilot. He was not flying the plane. He was listed as a passenger. The plane was an A-20, which is a twin engine aircraft.
The President’s recollection is that he was shot down over Guinea on a recon mission. The plane was ditched at sea, with no record of it being shot down, crashing hard nose-first into the sea after both engines failed. As David points out, it’s highly unlikely the cannibals got their scuba gear on, hauled up the bodies from the wreckage, and then ate them. Poor Uncle Bosie wasn’t spying, he was filling in on a courier mission.
In fact, the New Yorker actually did the research and confirmed that Joe Biden’s scurrilous slander of South Pacific cannibals everywhere is not at all what happened. According to the only survivor of the crash, the plane got lost after its navigation system failed, ran out of gas, and crash-landed into the ocean. It was an accident, a tragic one to be sure, but not combat.
As reported by the New Yorker a year and a half ago, the only survivor of the crash that killed Biden’s uncle said that no one else escaped the plane pic.twitter.com/uMSaYXuWc5
— Zach Parkinson (@AZachParkinson) April 17, 2024
So besides having virtually every detail about Uncle Ambrose wrong, and provably wrong from press clippings, obituaries, researched articles, and Joe Biden’s own autobiography, Promises To Keep, the context behind the Uncle Ambrose story was to shame Donald Trump for allegedly spurning an official trip to Normandy as president in order to honor those who sacrificed on D-Day, and repeating the debunked lie that Trump referred to all military personnel that died in service to this country as suckers and losers.
Donald Trump did indeed have to skip a trip to Normandy, reachable only via helicopter due to there being no airbase big enough nearby that can land Air Force One. Trump wanted to go and give an address, but the Secret Service scuttled the trip at the last second due to high winds and bad weather, citing it was unsafe to fly him in and out. Trump gave his address at a cemetery just outside of Paris instead.
Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic tried to debunk Trump’s explanation in the Atlantic, but presidential records trump fact-checkers. In 2020, documentation showed that the Navy did indeed make a bad weather call that diverted the trip from Normandy to Paris. Trump was right.
Joe Biden is conflating the trip to France with Trump’s animus towards the Late Arizona Senator John McCain, who was a POW, as a sucker and loser. It’s just not a fair or accurate charge to make, regardless of whether you like Donald Trump or not. I didn’t appreciate the attack on McCain’s service by the former President. I disagreed with McCain plenty of times on a whole myriad of issues and tactics, but I thought that hit was way out of bounds. It still had nothing to do with the premise Biden is conjuring with the Uncle Ambrose story.
Biden’s trip to Pittsburgh was to give an address to the United Steelworkers Union. Here’s what the President told them.
That would be a fine and gracious statement to make, were it to be true. Of course, it’s not. The source? Joe Biden on February 1st, 2024 (a Thursday).
I guess to Joe Biden, it’s all one union. The Steelworkers, Auto Workers, Teamsters, AFSCME, they’re all basically the same. Just pander to whichever one you’re addressing at that particular time seems to be Biden’s motto. The problem with this? Neither group endorsed his 1972 Senate campaign first. The United Auto Workers took five months into Biden’s campaign before endorsing him.
And that steelworkers endorsement story?
It looks like Biden didn’t get endorsed by the steelworkers early on, he just got endorsed by a separate group ***in a place where ironworkers met*** (not the USW).
The small local club that endorsed Biden met in the meeting hall for… pic.twitter.com/yis5Sgtl9d
— Zach Parkinson (@AZachParkinson) April 18, 2024
Delaware Ironworkers Local 571 was the first union group to endorse Biden. Iron – steel, what’s the difference?
Haifa – Rafah, what’s the difference? Never mind the fact that the two cities are about a three and a half hour drive apart, and one is full of three battalions of Hamas terrorists, and the other is a thriving metropolis inside Israel. If it weren’t so serious, you could write all this off as Joe Biden doing his Blutarsky impression from Animal House.
The problem, however, is Joe Biden is not a drunk frat house kid in their 20s in charge of anything. Biden is president of the United States of America. This is the super genius that is allegedly masterminding the escalating Middle East crisis. I know there are a lot of people out there that would counter with, “But Trump…”. Spare me the whataboutism. Joe Biden is not up to this job. You know it. I know it. Our allies know it. Our adversaries sure as hell know it. And as I remind you every time he stumbles through one of these episodes, which seem to be happening with increasing frequency, at 81 years-old, this is still Joe Biden’s best day. He will only decline further tomorrow.