Following the last presidential debate on Thursday, Daniel Dale of CNN tweeted: ‘’Biden was imperfect from a fact check perspective. He made at least a few false, misleading, or lacking in context claims. Trump was, as usual, a serial liar.”
But CNN, as usual, got it somewhat wrong. It isn’t Trump that is the serial liar, but Biden. Of the things President Trump said during the debate, nothing was out of line with the many articles I have read from economists and others, except for a couple of figures that he quoted. I have not read that Hunter Biden made $180,000 a month from the Ukrainian company, Burisma, but rather $50,000 to $80,000 depending on the source. However, the President’s sources are far better informed than the writers I follow, so perhaps that figure was not so far off. I also hadn’t heard a $100 trillion figure mentioned for Biden’s economic and environmental proposals, but the figures I have seen were mighty close to it. Nothing else that the President said seemed out of line from what Russ and I already had known. No lies there, much less serial lies. But, after all, this has been the theme of the media from the day Donald Trump announced his candidacy. Remember all the hullabaloo about his “lying” about being wire-tapped in Trump Tower? Well, although his (and my) generation would call spying on phone calls wiretapping even though now it is done in a more sophisticated way since we all carry cell phones, none-the-less, we now know that Carter Page and numerous others in his campaign and later in his transition team were being listened to by Democrat sympathizers in the FBI and DOJ making use of what they heard to attempt to overthrow his presidency.
So, despite the mantra of the left and its media, President Trump is not a serial liar. But it appears that Joe Biden is. We will get to his “few false, misleading, or lacking context claims” at the debate in a minute, but first let’s look at other lies he has spread over the years.
He said he was the first person in his family to go to college, but he wasn’t.
He said he graduated from college with three degrees, but he only graduated with one.
He said he was against the Iraq War from the beginning, but he wasn’t.
He said he called Slobodan Milosevic a “war criminal” to his face, but he didn’t.
He said he had been a coal miner, but he wasn’t.
He said he had been shot at in Iraq, but he wasn’t.
He said his wife and daughter were killed by a drunk driver, but in fact his wife pulled into the path of a sober driver who was unable to avoid hitting her.
He said the helicopter he was flying in in Afghanistan was “forced down” near where they thought Osama Bin Laden was hiding, but in fact the helicopter had to land because of heavy snow.
In the 1987 Democrat primary debate, Biden plagiarized from British politician Neil Kinnock, including a story about being arrested in South Africa. He hadn’t been, Kinnock had.
Biden said, “I got raised in the black church. We would go sit in Rev. Herring’s church, sit there before we’d go out, and try to change things when I was a kid in college and in high school.” One wonder why someone who idolized the leader of the KKK would be attending a black church. But, no worries, although Rev. Herring is no longer around, several parishioners from that time are and no one remembers seeing Joe’s shiny white face in their congregation.
Joe Biden has often claimed that he attended college on a full academic scholarship. In fact, he got a partial scholarship based on financial need. He also graduated 76th out of a Law School class of 85 at Syracuse University, not the stellar academic record he would have us believe.
Biden also told a town hall audience in South Carolina before the Democrat primary, “I got started out of an HBCU, Delaware State – now, I don’t want to hear anything negative about Delaware State. They’re my folks.”Delaware State is an historically black college, whose director of news service told the Washington Times, “Vice President Biden did not attend DSU.” However, he was the Commencement keynote speaker in 2003 and was awarded an honorary degree at that time. There has been spin on this lie, as on most of the others, suggesting the he didn’t really mean what he said.
Now to the false and misleading claims from debate night.
Joe Biden claimed he hadn’t called President Trump xenophobic for his travel ban, saying, “He is xenophobic, but not because he shut down travel to China.” However, immediately after the China travel ban was announced on January 30, Biden tweeted: “We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science – not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering.” I might also add, that President Trump in his usual “fear-mongering” fashion, spoke optimistically at the debate about his own recovery from COVID-19, the need to open the economy and send children back to school, and the probability of as many as two vaccines within the next few weeks. This contrasted with Joe Biden’s prediction of a “dark winter” ahead.
Biden accused the President of being slow to ban flights from Europe, yet although the President announced the European travel ban on March 11, the Biden campaign did not endorse it until April, spending the ensuing time belittling the travel ban.
Biden said, “There is no evidence that when you raise the minimum wage, businesses go out of business. That is simply not true.” But it is true. When Walmart in Paris raised its wages, hours were cut for employees. The same happened in Seattle when they passed the MW-15 bill. Some workers lost their jobs and others had their hours cut. A 40 hour week at $10 an hour is $400, but a 20 hour week at $15 an hour is only $300 a week! In fact, in New York City, the bar where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez worked before becoming a congresswoman, went out of business totally when wages went up in the City.
When pressed by President Trump about Hunter’s emails, Biden sputtered, “There are 50 former intelligence folks who said what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant.” In fact, the FBI has the actual computer (which the Biden family had belatedly sent their lawyer to retrieve from the repair shop), corroborating emails have been produced by business associates of Hunter Biden, and John Radcliffe of National Intelligence has said there is no evidence of Russian involvement in any of the emails.
Attempting to frighten the elderly, Biden claimed, “If in fact he (the President) continues his plan to withhold the tax on Social Security, Social Security will be bankrupt by 2023.” And he would be correct, if the President was going to simply stop putting money into the SS fund. Instead, he wishes to reduce the amount individuals pay into the system, replacing that money from the general fund. The President has promised repeatedly to protect social security, and he has proven that he keeps his promises.
Biden charged that we have a higher trading deficit with China than we did before. This is a flat out lie with no wiggle room at all. In 2019 our trading deficit with China had shrunk by $70 billion dollars and in 2020 it has dropped even farther.
Biden told a whopper when he said, “Not one single person with private insurance would lose their insurance under my plan (they all will!), nor did they under ‘Obamacare.’ They did not lose their insurance unless they chose they wanted to go to something else.” Everyone lost their insurance and many their doctors under Obamacare as they will under the Biden plan. Time Magazine called Obama’s promise of “If you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance.” The Lie of the Year!
Biden, intent on placing the blame for the pandemic on President Trump claimed, “The expectation is we’ll have another 200,000 Americans dead in the time between now and the endo of the year. If we just wore these masks, the president’s own advisers have told him, we could save 100,000 lives.” First, many of the 200,000 plus deaths attributed to COVID-19 were individuals who did not die from the pandemic, but from old age, cancer, or even accidents. The CDC advised doctors to call a death a COVID death if they even suspected that might have been the cause. In New York, morticians said every body they got was listed as a COVID death, every single one. One family, who was related to a State Supreme Court Justice, was able to get an autopsy for their loved one. She had not even had COVID when she died. In another state, two young men died supposedly from COVID and a reporter asked the health official if both of them had had underlying health problems. The answer? “No, one of them died from a motorcycle accident.” So first of all, the figures are grossly inflated. Secondly, those deaths occurred over nearly 10 months when scientists and doctors were struggling to figure out how to treat the illness and little was known about how it spread and who were the most vulnerable. Now we have treatments that save lives and we know who are the most vulnerable and need to be protected. And the only place you find the claim of 100,000 lives saved by wearing masks is from a model at the University of Washington. At the same time, a recent study from Denmark (which is being ignored by most American medical journals because it does not fit the CDC’s theories) shows that masks are mostly ineffectual in protecting anyone from the virus. Thus, Biden’s statement is again, a lie.
Then he continued, “Imagine had he (President Trump) at the State of Union stood up and said, when back in January . . . imagine if he had said something.” But the President did say something at the State of the Union. He assured us “Protecting Americans’ health also means fighting infectious diseases. WE are coordinating with the Chinese government and working closely together on the Coronavirus outbreak in China. My Administration will take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from this threat.”
He concluded, “Columbia Medical School pointed out if [Trump] acted one week earlier, he would have saved 37,000 lives. All the way back, and I was on one of your shows, all the way back in March, I was calling for the need for us to have masks, have the president’s staff tell us what’s going on.” Except that he was still holding rallies with no social distancing and no masks through early March and did not begin wearing masks until after the White House Coronavirus Task Force suggested it. Who was lagging behind here? Not the President!
About fuel, Biden first said, “I stopped giving the oil industry federal subsidies. He won’t give federal subsidies to solar and wind.” Except that billions of dollars in federal subsidies go to renewable energy each year, and Biden seemed to forget all the companies like Solyndra into whom millions of taxpayer dollars were poured during the Obama/Biden years, only to have the companies fail.
Then, perhaps having forgotten what he has previously said, Biden claimed, “I never said I opposed fracking.” Then, when President Trump reminded him that he was on video doing just that, he incomprehensibly challenged the President to put it on his website. The Trump team had a collage of multiple times in which Biden had said he would absolutely stop fracking loaded onto the internet within 20 minutes. Kamala Harris has also said she is unquestionably in favor of banning fracking.
And of course, once again he accused the President of not denouncing white supremacists. This lie is so old it has grown a very long beard. The President has denounced white supremacists repeatedly including during his comments after Charlottesville when he called white supremacists “very bad people.”
CNN’s Daniel Dale got half of his tweet right. But using “false, misleading, without context” doesn’t really say what should have been said. The serial liar at the presidential debate was Joe Biden, not President Donald Trump. When someone has such a poor relationship with the truth as Joe Biden has, how can we believe anything he tells us?