Former Vice President Joe Biden’s penchant for misstating the facts is so severe his opponents often question his mental acuity.
But they may want to consider the possibility that he is merely dishonest.
Biden told an audience at a recent campaign event in South Carolina that he was arrested decades ago in South Africa for attempting to meet with then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela.
“This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid,” the former vice president said. “I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto, trying to get to see him on Robbens Island.”
Biden has told this story at least three times this month, including a version that pegs the year of his alleged arrest at around the time he proposed to his wife in 1977.
There is only one problem with the former vice president’s story: No one seems to have any idea what he is talking about, least of all the aforementioned U.N. ambassador, Andrew Young, who told the New York Times, “I was never arrested and I don’t think he was, either.”
The Times scoured for evidence of the supposed Soweto incident. It came up empty-handed, which is astonishing considering Biden was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1973, four years prior to his alleged arrest in South Africa. It should not be difficult to find evidence of a member of the U.S. Congress being forcibly detained in a foreign country during an overseas trip in the late 1970s. Also, there is the fact that Soweto is roughly 900 miles away from Robbens Island.
The Biden campaign declined to respond to five separate requests for comment from the Times, which obviously does not bode well for the credibility of the anecdote.
This is not the first time that the former vice president has told a story on the 2020 campaign trail that is almost certainly a load of malarkey.
In August 2019, Biden claimed a four-star general asked him when he was vice president to visit the Konar province in Afghanistan to personally recognize a Navy captain’s heroism. Biden claimed the captain initially refused the Silver Star, saying he did not think he deserved it.
“He said, ‘Sir, I don’t want the damn thing!'” the 2020 candidate told a crowd in New Hampshire. “‘Do not pin it on me, sir! Please, sir. Do not do that! He died. He died!'”
Biden got the year, the location, the heroism, the type of medal, the military branch, and the recipient’s rank wrong. The anecdote, though loosely based on real-life events, never happened the way Biden told it. Or, as the Washington Post puts it, Biden seems to have “jumbled elements of at least three actual events into one story of bravery, compassion and regret that never happened.”
Is it a false memory? Is it intentional dishonesty? Who knows!
All we know is that there is much more where this sort of thing comes from, including when Biden claimed last year that the survivors of the Parkland shooting “came up to see me when I was vice president.” The Parkland shooting was in 2018. Biden left the White House in 2016.
The most alarming thing about the former vice president’s dubious claims is that they are not minor “misspeaks” of verbal flubs, such as when he said, “Poor kids are just as bright, just as talented, as white kids.” Biden’s claims about pinning medals and getting arrested in South Africa are statements of fact. They are about historical events he claims to have experienced, and they may or may not be complete fabrications.
There is also the smaller problem of Biden being just plain wrong on basic facts. This genre of falsehood is not as troubling as his apparently invented anecdotes, but it is no less disturbing for its factual inaccuracies.
Biden claimed last fall that “Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King” were “assassinated in the ’70s, the late ’70s when I got engaged.” King and Kennedy were both killed in 1968. Biden claimed his late son, Beau, served as “Attorney General of the United States.” Beau Biden was the attorney general of Delaware. The former vice president claimed 40 people were killed in the 1970 Kent State shooting. Four students were killed. Biden claimed the 2019 El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, mass-shootings happened in “Houston” and “Michigan.” He once referred to the Second Amendment as the First. Biden repeatedly confuses the cities and states in which he is speaking. The list goes on.
These and other false claims, including Biden’s tales from Afghanistan and meeting with Parkland students, happen with enough regularity that one is left to wonder whether it is mere sloppiness or intentional dishonesty. Perhaps, as the former vice president’s opponents suggest, it is an issue of mental acuity. Then again, perhaps Biden simply struggles to tell the truth.
