I must return to the subject of President Joe Biden’s falsehoods. Despite devoting this space last week to “White House Whoppers,” it’s necessary to discuss our chief executive’s dishonesty further, for it’s been glaringly exposed again, this time by the military brass.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, and Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, made it plain to Congress that they’d advised Biden to keep 2,500 military personnel in Afghanistan to evacuate Americans, legal residents, and allies before the Taliban takeover. They didn’t want to scuttle away as ordered.
They tried not to drop their boss into the doo-doo with too big a splash but wanted it known that the fiasco of America’s humiliating withdrawal could not be attributed to poor advice from them. It was due entirely to Biden’s vanity and pig-headedness. Our cover story is a symposium of experts assessing where Biden’s monumental blunder has left America in the eyes of the world, most notably in the view of our enemies. It’s sobering but necessary reading.
My focus, however, is on how Biden displayed what poker players call a “tell” that would expose his culpability. Interviewing the president after the debacle, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, obviously in possession of precise information, asked, “No one told you — your military advisers did not tell you, ‘No, we should just keep 2,500 troops. … We can continue to do that’?”
Biden answered, “No, no one said that to me, that I can recall.”
The tell is “that I can recall.” It’s popular phrasing from evasive politicians because it brings two advantages. It sounds like an honest search through memory files to help the questioner, which superficially conveys transparency. Yet, at the same time, it turns a lie into a deflection that’s harder to prove absolutely false. They’re not saying something did not happen, merely that they can’t remember. Try to prove that untrue.
This has been a career-long technique of the Clintons, masters of slippery, dirty dealing. Bill, whose near-perfect memory of detail was a salient feature of his political skill set, told a grand jury investigating the Monica Lewinsky scandal 110 times that he did not “necessarily remember” or words to that effect. Hillary did the same some 40 times in three hours of grilling by the FBI about her private server and secret email account — I do “not recall,” I “cannot remember,” ad infinitum.
Not remembering can be believable about an individual email from years ago. But Biden is flat implausible when he claims he doesn’t recall the military advice he received weeks before his bungled effort to end America’s longest war. He can’t remember if the generals said stay or go? I suggested above that it’s hard to prove a lie when camouflaged as poor memory. But sometimes, circumstantial evidence amounts to an open and shut case. That’s how it is now with Biden.
America has a credibility problem among friends and enemies around the world. It’s dangerous, and it starts at the top with the president.
