If Joe Biden had any brains, he would apologize for lying about South Africa and leave it at that.
But Joe is going to be Joe.
The former vice president and 2020 Democratic primary candidate now denies he intended to deceive voters when he claimed he was arrested in South Africa in the late 1970s for attempting to meet with then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela. The original falsehood, which was absolutely intentional, was bad enough. Refusing to admit error only makes it worse.
“What I was doing was talking about the fact that I was strongly opposed to apartheid,” he said this weekend in an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace.
As Biden would say: Come on, man. The only honest play for him is to admit he lied when he said he was arrested. But Biden refuses to do that. He claims instead that he was merely careless in his choice of words, a defense that is as unbelievable as it is insulting.
“When we landed — we were going to Soweto,” Biden told Wallace, “we landed in Johannesburg, and the Afrikaners took me off the plane, took me in one direction, wanted me to go through a white-only door, and, in fact, I wouldn’t move.”
He added, “I said, ‘Everybody else had gone through another door. I’m going with the black delegation that I came with.’ They said, ‘No, you can’t.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m standing here. I’m not going to move.’ And they would not let me move anywhere, so I guess I should have said I was detained. I was not able to move forward.”
Note that this version, like the story he has been telling for the last month, is still extremely doubtful. After multiple inconsistencies were flagged in Biden’s story, including the fact that Soweto is 900 miles from Robben Island and that U.S. congressional delegations at that time would have landed in Lesotho, not in South Africa, the former vice president’s campaign responded with an attempt at damage control.
Emphasis on the word “attempt.”
Biden’s latest version of events ignores the problem of whether a congressional delegation in the late 1970s would have landed in South Africa. It was customary for them to fly into Lesotho, as the Washington Post reported.
But I suspect you have figured out by now that the Biden campaign’s damage control is not about getting the facts straight. It is about running interference to keep things confusing surrounding what is most certainly a complete lie. By compounding the original lie with weasely attempts to avoid owning up to it, Biden and his team are actually making matters worse. He is not just a liar, but a stubborn one at that.
