On Trump? About JB beating him up in high school for disrespecting women? 
Anything else, like, at all?
This one I will cop to. It wasn’t a lie - I was unaware of the double major when I said it, and was thinking of his law degree.
But I will point out that Biden said he had three undergrad degrees, when in fact he had one with a double major. However, if you add his law degree, you get two degrees, one with a double major. That’s close enough to ‘three degrees’ that I’d let it slide. However, he still lied about a lot of it.
Here’s a cite that verifies pretty much everything else I said:
Biden being the 'outstanding student in political science:
The fact is, Biden challenged someone to an IQ contest, and to prove his intellectual superiority proceeded to describe what sounds like a sterling academic career filled with scholarships, winning international competitions, etc.
In fact, Biden was a shitty student with crappy grades and a black mark for plagirism in law school, who graduated in the bottom third of his undergrad class and near the absolute bottom in law school. He never won an academic scholarship and did not win any international competitions.
Good for you for, like Joe Biden, admitting to at least some of your factual errors. Hopefully this will inspire you to be more accurate in your future claims, as well as perhaps give you some greater empathy for other humans who, like you (and everyone!), occasionally make mistakes (even factual mistakes).
So after all that, one error about the double major in a sea of citations for everything else I said warrants this, plus another round of ‘Sam Stone is a liar’ in the pit? Okay, then.
You made multiple factual errors in your mostly uncited claims about someone’s supposed serial dishonesty – that warrants some criticism, IMO. If you’re going to make claims about someone else’s factual accuracy, it pays to be very careful, as careful as you can, to be 100% accurate. YMMV (and apparently does).
Just out of curiosity I plugged a bunch of Republicans and Democrats into politifact just to see where Biden stood. The selection of who to pick was relatively arbitrary but basically involved my trying to think of prominent politicians, but excluding those who were obviously Trump trolls (e.g. Greene) or had too few Politifact entries to allow for a reasoable samples (e.g. AOC). Reported below are the proportion of checked claims that were “mostly false” or worse. As you can see Biden is pretty middle of the road. significantly worse than most Democrats but better than all Republicans except for a tie with Romney.
D Warren 16
D Newsome 20
D Obama 23
D Hillary Clinton 27
R Romney 40
D Biden 40
R Rubio 42
R McConnell 43
R DeSantis 45
D Pelosi 45
D Schumer 46
R Pence 52
R Cruz 66
R McCarthy 76
Modnote: Sam, I think you are well aware of the fact you can’t accuse posters of trolling in P&E. This includes accusations of sealioning. Please don’t do this again.
I assume that most of those relate to policy claims, which is most of what PolitiFact deals with. The assertion in this thread relates specifically to his claims about his own history (which is what’s relevant to the OP here). It would appear that Biden has a particular issue in this regard, as indicated in the CNN article that I linked.
You may have to walk back this one as well. Biden’s great-grand father and great-great-grandfather both worked as a coal mining engineer and coal mine inspector (although neither were “coal miners”)
As best I can tell, the quote you’re referring to is this one:
And I know, having `had a house burn down with my wife in it — she got out safely, God willing — that having a significant portion of it burn, I can tell: 10 minutes makes a hell of a difference. It makes a big difference.
He did not say that his house “burned to the ground” nor that his wife “barely got out alive.” He did say “burn down,” which one could call an exaggeration except that in the very same sentence he remarks about having a “significant portion” burn. It’s clearly a minor slip of the tongue, or possibly even just a dialect issue, and not a lie or even exaggeration.
Some articles mention that it was a “small fire”, like this one:
However, that is relative to what firefighters face. I would not consider any fire that required firefighters at all to be “small” (a small fire would be one that I could handle personally). And given that most fire deaths are due to smoke inhalation, Biden was not wrong to remark on his wife’s safety.
So your characterization of his remarks is incorrect both in detail and in spirit, even if Biden did misspeak when he said “burn down”.
Or perhaps you are referring to an earlier event, where he said:
Lightning struck my home and destroyed a significant portion of it, and you got my wife out. …And in addition to my wife, you got my second-best love out of the house: my ‘67 Corvette. So thank you all.
Heavy smoke damage to the kitchen would certainly count as “destroy[ing] a significant portion of it”. And while it may not have been literally true that they got his wife out, it probably was true that they saved the Corvette–small fires tend to become large fires if left alone, after all. The firefighter in the link above mentions “Luckily, we got it pretty early” and thus Biden is right to be thankful of the rapid response of the firefighters.
The problem is that you didn’t describe whaat happened. You described something else entirely.
You have to be kidding. Nothing about that makes anything I said wrong.
Neither people he mentioned were coal miners, and therefore have nothing to do with a claim of his relatives coming up from 12 hours in the coal mines to play a game of football.
He clearly stole the entire story from Kinnock. The fact that he dug up a distant relative related to the mining industry but not actually a minor is ass-covering, not any kind of justification for his stealing another man’s biographical story.
This may be the nittiest of nitpicks I’ve ever seen. So he said ‘burned down’ and I said ‘burned to the ground’? The horror. I was operating from memory, and got it right. The meaning is the same.
Look, the guy implied that his wife was lucky to have survived a major fire that burned down his house. The very link you posted shows what an exaggeration that was. It was described as ‘a small fire that was contained in the kitchen.’ And it took 20 minutes to put out.
Only if you ignore the rest of the sentence, in which he clearly just says that a “significant portion” burned. You took two words out of context–where the context is a single sentence–and couldn’t even get those right.
It took firefighters 20 minutes to put out. Firefighters that reported smoke coming from the house as they arrived. It was a small fire from their perspective, not from the perspective of an occupant of the house.
You didn’t even say “small” originally; you said “a minor kitchen fire”. I suspect most people might think of something that you throw a pan lid or some baking soda on when one says “minor kitchen fire”. Not something where heavy smoke is visible outside the house. It almost certainly caused major damage both to the kitchen and the rest of the house (smoke damage is no laughing matter).
Read what you wrote again. Previously you made a very definitive statement:
“By the way. his ancesstors never worked in coal mines.”
This was meant specifically to counter Biden’s statement, which you yourself quoted as:
“My Ancestors, Who Worked In The Coal Mines Of Northeast Pennsylvania”
You called the above a lie.
I provided evidence that Biden’s ancestor’s did, in fact, work in the coal mines of Pennsylvania. Yes, there are other clear embellishments to Biden’s story or outright fabrications, but this part appears to be completely factual (at least per the Washington Post link above) , and much closer to the truth than your statement.
Instead of just walking it back, realizing you misremembered, or perhaps unintentionally embellished your above statement to fit your pre-existing narrative, you instead are choosing to double down.
That’s his go-to when his “research “ is shown to be in error. Double down, blame others. Next, he will accuse you of picking on him just so you can get in with the “cool kids”
The concept of checking his sources before posting never seems to occur to him.
I don’t agree with you about this (& neither does the WP article that you linked to).
The WP was fact-checking the more recent claim by Biden that some of his ancestors were coal miners, and they found that a couple could technically qualify. As they put it:
In other words, both men worked in and around mines, either as an inspector or engineer. That’s not the same thing as “coal miner,” someone who has the job of extracting the coal. But such jobs are still part of the coal industry. The Bureau of Labor Statistics includes engineers and inspectors as part of its definition of “coal mining jobs.” The Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977 says that anyone who works at a mining site, including contractors, such as engineers, would be defined as a miner.
But context is key here. If you’re just claiming that the guy was a “coal miner”, then you can get away with the fact that the BLS considers these jobs “coal mining jobs”. But if you’re saying “My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours”, then you’re clearly trying to convey that the guy was engaged in the manual physical labor of coal mining for hours on end still had enough energy to play football afterwards, IOW, not a mining engineer or inspector.
Plausible deniability. For certain values of “plausible”.
D-K is a real thing. If someone tells you that they are so very smart, you an count on their ignorance. A genuinely intelligent person understands that you will eventually figure out how smart they are, and thus has no need to inform you of it. I have seen little, if any, evidence of Biden proclaiming his superior intellect or projecting the sense that he feels smarter than everyone else, though I have not spent a lot effort following his speakages.
I don’t disagree with this. Clearly, Biden is (probably intentionally) blurring the lines between the professions (although to be charitable, he may just have been repeating stuff he heard as a kid), embellishing the stuff about 12 hour in the mine , and the football portion was clearly lifted from Kinnock’s speech.
And if Sam’s objection was limited to that half of Biden’s statement, I wouldn’t have found fault with it. But Sam said (emphasis mine):
“his ancestors never worked in coal mines”.
Which seems clearly false, or a mis-representation of the facts.
FFS. Can’t we all agree that Biden has had a tendency to embellish events from his past – and that this tendency has fuck-all to do with how well (or not) he performs his duties as President?
If voters cared about this shit, Trump would still be in office.