Is there any truth at all to this? Is there anything resembling any sort of truth in this? Wouldn’t that have been a major international incident for South Africa to arrest a sitting United States Senator?
If this seems to be bullshit, why is Biden continuing to bullshit in this modern day when anything can be checked?
If it really happened, I can’t imagine something like that not being all over the news…
Washington Post says it’s “ridiculous”.
Andrew Young says it never happened, and Biden didn’t mention it in the passage in his memoir about his visit to South Africa.
Biden’s clearly failing… to keep up with the lies of his prospective Republican opponent. He needs to up his game.
I can see that honesty and personal integrity are important issues with you. So here’s what I recommend; next November you vote for the candidate who has told the fewest lies.
Considering Robben Island is in Cape Town, over a thousand miles from Soweto, I doubt the police would need to do any arresting or even care. And of course it’s an island, a very small one, completely isolated and secured. There was no way to get there without government consent, none at all.
His surrogates are saying that he was “detained” for not going in a different line than the black caucus he was with until they found a workaround. They aren’t saying how long he was detained.
If that’s true, then he’s stretching the definition of “arrested” by quite a bit.
I personally think this never happened and that he’s lying, or that he is really so mentally gone that he’s mistaking a story he heard for his own experience. Either way, I think saying this was a bad move.
Careful, there, you might be seen as casting doubt on the pristine veracity of the Washington Examiner!
He also claims 150 million Americans have been killed by gun violence since 2007. That averages over 31,000 people per day, and would be half the population. I’m wondering if it’s (mild) early onset dementia.
Eh, I think he just flubbed “millions” when he meant “thousands” while speaking. I don’t think this is evidence of much of anything.
Where was this? On Robben Island? They let a whole U.S. delegation visit Mandela but the visiting room was segregated?
Not sure where either.
From the WaPo article:
His elaboration of an incident like this into being arrested trying to see Mandela is pretty eye-rolly, but it’s not like he made it up out of whole cloth.
I’m trying to keep up-to-date with modern lingo, but my dictionary shows “Truth” as an archaism. Google Books Ngram Viewer shows that, except for a brief resurgence from 1866 to 1872, the use of “truth” has been declining steadily since 1846.
Google does come up with some old usages:
… but these still leave me confused.
This wasn’t addressed to me, but I’ll take the pledge. Others?
Personally, it’s less about the lie and more about the general stupidity of lying about something so easily checked.
Before I get jumped on for excusing Trump for lying or being stupid, it is entirely possible to hold both in contempt for stupidity and lying.
Also, “they do it too!”
Yes, they are both liars. Also, an elephant and a mouse are both mammals. Which is bigger?
(Take your time, think it over, you got this…)
So, did the “Christian” Right buy out the Moonies, or round them up and execute them? Make a great mini-series…
The Moonies own Washington Times. Although The Washington Examiner has hired some of the better Times writers, it’s owned by hyper-Christian multi-billionaire Philip Anschutz:
I forget the name for the ploy (“bait and switch”?) but the idea is that with the Moonie Times acting like fringe-nuts, the Examiner can aspire to seem moderate.
A good rule of thumb, I think, is that the truthy() U.S. newspapers — NY Times, Washington Post, WSJ — charge to be read, while the lying newspapers are happy to spread bullshit for free. ( - I’m using “truthy” in its archaic sense of “relating to facts; characterized by accuracy.”)
I’m too lazy to turn off Javascript or keep killing cookies, so I get my news from Reuters, Aljazeera, etc.