Tim Blair: The lie that Joe Biden’s ruined mind could not hide
OPINION: Reactions to Joe Biden’s catastrophic mental meltdown during the presidential debate fall into three main camps. The last camp are outright reality-deniers.
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Reactions to Joe Biden’s catastrophic mental meltdown during last week’s presidential debate fall into three main camps.
You’ve got your “no surprises here” team, who’ve been watching the US President decline year by year since before he even took office. Among this bunch, previously smeared as conspiracy theorists, Biden malfunction clips have been shared so frequently that last week’s debacle was just another episode in a long-running series.
Then you’ve got your fake-shocked media, who’ve been downplaying Biden’s hopeless blunders for decades and now have to pretend that their man’s complete collapse, broadcast live to the world, somehow came out of nowhere.
Why, Biden’s always seemed so fit and strong, and he falls down those stairs so healthily!
And lastly, we’ve got the outright reality-deniers who insist that despite his obvious infirmity, at least Biden is at heart a decent fellow who – unlike terrible Trump, curse his wicked cognitive clarity – would never stoop to lie.
Except he would and routinely does, at just about every opportunity. And last week’s debate featured the brazen repeat of a particularly wicked lie upon which Biden’s entire wreckage of a presidency was based.
It all began five years ago, when Biden cited a deadly 2017 conflict in Charlottesville, Virginia, as his primary reason for launching a presidential bid.
Specifically, Biden cited President Trump’s words following that conflict, which was provoked by the proposed removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee. All manner of people were involved, from murderous racial extremists and anti-Semites to local residents and other normals.
“That’s when we heard the words from the president of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation,” Biden claimed, noting that Trump had said that there were “some very fine people on both sides”.
As Biden framed Trump’s remarks, “both sides” meant white supremacists and their opponents. Trump, Biden continued, “assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it”.
And so Joe found himself duty bound to defeat the president and reclaim “the soul of the nation”. But lyin’ Biden deliberately left out a key Trump line in 2019 and he left it out again in last week’s debate.
Yes, Trump said that there were “some very fine people on both sides” of the statue removal debate. And just 154 words later, during the same press conference, he said this: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay?”
Trump specifically excluded white extremists from his “fine people” observation. Biden launched his presidential bid off the back of a lie.
It’s fitting that in last week’s disastrous debate, should it signal the end of Biden’s rule, this destructive and deceitful president again raved about Charlottesville. This time there were more Nazis and less coherence. Let’s go to the transcript:
“What got me involved to run in the first place after my son had died, I decided – in Iraq – because of Iraq, I said, I wasn’t going to run again.”
(We interrupt the president to indicate another lie. Beau Biden did not die in or because of Iraq. He died in an American hospital from brain cancer. Back to the tape.)
“Until I saw what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, people coming out of the woods carrying swastikas on torches – torches and singing the same anti-Semitic bile they sang when – back in Germany …
“What American president would ever say Nazis coming out of fields, carrying torches, singing the same anti-Semitic bile, carrying swastikas, were fine people?”
Not Trump, that’s for sure, who condemned “neo-Nazis and the white nationalists” from the outset.
Interestingly, just a few days prior to the debate, left-leaning fact-checker site Snopes belatedly turned its attention to the elderly “fine people” hoax.
“No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People’,” the site announced, apparently following some seven years of investigation.
Perhaps that post went up as a hint to Biden that he shouldn’t get himself caught in another lie.
If so, Joe didn’t get the memo. Judging by debate footage, he also didn’t get any memos about staring into space, leaving his mouth hang open and rambling about rape.
“Here’s the deal,” Biden said.
“There’s a lot of young women being raped by their in-laws, by their spouses, brothers and sisters, it’s just ridiculous and they can do nothing about, they try to arrest them when they cross state lines.”
The next debate is scheduled for September 10. Don’t bet on it.
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