When President Joe Biden passingly said in a voting rights speech last week that he had been “arrested” in the context of the civil rights movement – even suggesting this had happened more than once – it was a classic Biden false claim: an anecdote about his past for which there is no evidence, prompted by a decision to ad-lib rather than stick to a prepared text, resulting in easily avoidable questions about his honesty.
Biden made a series of claims about his own past that were just not true. It was these easy-to-understand, hard-to-defend personal falsehoods – more than his false claims about complex policy issues or obscure statistics, which supporters could more easily dismiss as good-faith errors – that provided the best ammunition for opponents looking to portray him as deceptive.
Of course, if you set the bar at Trump levels, then Biden is a great paradigm of honesty. Any resemblence between a Trump statement and the truth is accidental. But if looked at in comparison to ordinary standards of honesty and reliability - the type you would expect from your friends, relatives, coworkers etc., Biden falls short.
The Democratic debate was on August 23 (& a subsequent NEA interview on August 26). The issue was first raised in media articles on September 12.
Further, it wasn’t just that he lifted the phrasing from Kinnock’s speech, but that he fabricated aspects of his (Biden’s) and his family history in order to fit the story that Kinnock said about the Kinnock family to himself.
I hope you’re not a politician – you’re amazingly tone-deaf politically speaking. If Biden said something like what you said, it would rank among the top-ten worse gaffes of the last 50 years.
Inflation has sunk past presidents in election years. It hits citizens in their pockets and shrinks their saving. The polls are saying it is one of the top priorities and depending on the poll you look at, the top priority that the administration has to get under control. It might be other aspects of what they do between now and November mitigate the backlash of higher prices and keep the Congressional control but to actually ask that question deserves a mocking response.
The situation is somewhat problematic. According to the economist Robert Reich, what we are seeing is not classical inflation, because large corporations seem to be showing increasing relative profit margins. In other words, prices are rising because of what appears to be plain old gouging.
Now, it could be that companies are trying to set up rainy-day capital for dealing with the next crisis. It is kind of hard to guess what is actually going on. Maybe they just saw a prime opportunity to stoke their bottom lines and jumped on it. Whatever the real cause, most voters only perceive the pain.
The sad thing is that Joe the President has always acted like a fawning corporatist, so he is a uniquely inapt leader for dealing with this problem, assuming Mister Reich is right. The inflation appears to be a a matter of proactive choice on the part of a handful of wealthy individuals, upon whom he has minimal influence. How would you deal with that?
If they collapse, then we won’t have to spend money on them. If anyone is injured or killed in the collapses, then it’s their own fault. They knew the condition of the bridges, and they chose to drive on them anyway. Also, if the bridges collapse, then it’s up to each person’s Personal Responsibility™ to find alternate routes. Why should the Government and the Deep State force people to drive routes they select, and put money into bridges that most taxpayers in the country will never use?
He didn’t ‘quote’ Kinnock. He appeopriated his words for himself, including his biography. Here is a relevant part from Kinnock’s speech:
Kinnock:
And here’s Biden:
By the way. his ancesstors never worked in coal mines. Kinnock’s did. He lied about that too.
Also, his wife wasn’t the first member of her family to go to college. He father went to college on the GI Bill, and Jill Biden’s older sister went to college before she did. That’s as far as I looked to find out that was a lie as well.
This clearly isn’t Biden quoting someone and then failing to attribute it. He took Kinnock’s history and tried to make it his own. And it was an incredibly stupid thing to do. He paid a big political price for it, and it helped sink his first two runs at President, especially since the later plagairaism brought to light his plagiarism scandal from college.