Framed on a wall in my office is a copy of my first opinion column, published by the Dallas Morning News on Oct. 11, 1987. Until then, I had been a wire service reporter and editor in Washington, D.C., and, before that, a sportswriter in Boston, but had never written opinion.
When given the chance by the Morning News, I jumped on a subject that had piqued my curiosity: A senator for Delaware running for president had brazenly stolen a speech by a Welsh Labour Party leader in the United Kingdom and, when caught, paid the price by humiliatingly dropping out of the 1988 presidential race.
The Welsh politician was Neil Kinnock, and 27-year-old me simply used the brouhaha over the purloined speech as an excuse to praise him for daring to tell Labourites that “socialism had become old hat,” as I put it. Democrats should be stealing that speech, I wrote.
The senator for Delaware was President Joe Biden. Over the last 37 years since my column was published, I have watched him lie and lie again, sometimes about small things, other times about larger ones, but always with impunity.
The media are just as much to blame for Biden’s habitual dishonesty because instead of covering him, they’ve covered for him.
Even on those rare occasions when the legacy media have acknowledged that Biden is a fabulist, they have made excuses for him. The New York Times, for example, wrote protectively of him in 2022, saying that “President Biden has been unable to break himself of the habit of embellishing narratives to weave a political identity.”
It’s not that he’s lying, you see. Biden merely adorns reality.
Sometimes Biden’s fabrications were just so oddball that they made you wonder if he was all there —even before he started showing signs of senility. An example of this is Biden’s insistence that his “Uncle Bosie” was eaten by cannibals in Papua New Guinea during World War II. The Defense Department was forced to put out a statement that Ambrose J. Finnegan was lost when his plane crashed in the Pacific Ocean.
Biden has also lied about graduating in the top half of his law school class, having his house “burn down with my wife in it,” growing up in the Puerto Rican community, and once being the driver of “an 18-wheeler” to name only a handful of falsehoods that reveal a bizarre distance from reality.
He also habitually lies about former President Donald Trump leaving behind a 9% inflation rate. Inflation was 1.4% in January 2021.
Other times, however, Biden’s mendacity reveals a level of pathos that makes you want to look away. A case in point is when he told the mothers of the 13 soldiers killed in Afghanistan because of his ill-conceived pullout in 2021 that he could feel their pain because his son, Beau Biden, had also died in the war.
It was not the first time. Joe Biden has a history of saying that Beau Biden “lost his life in Iraq.” Beau Biden died tragically at the age of 46 in 2015 of cancer at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
“We lost our son as well and brought him home in a flag-draped coffin,” Cheryl Rex said the president told her. Rex later complained at a forum , “My heart started beating faster, and I started shaking, knowing that their son died from cancer and they were able to be by his side.”
The context was Joe Biden’s stubborn insistence at the time that he was not culpable for the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. He was callously using his family’s tragedy to buy sympathy. As the Wall Street Journal’s Bill McGurn put it , “Mr. Biden is not a gold star father and should stop playing one on TV.”
This long record of deceitfulness was on display in the president's televised trainwreck of a debate with Trump on June 27, when he again lied about many things, including not having any military deaths during his term in office.
“I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any, this decade, that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world,” Joe Biden said at one point, ignoring the 13 body bags from the attack during his Afghanistan withdrawal, again painfully reminding the loved ones of those who died.
Joe Biden also claimed that Trump left him a 15% unemployment rate, that he had been endorsed by the U.S. Border Patrol, and that Trump had told people to inject themselves with bleach during the pandemic. All these things were lies.
Incongruously, post-debate Joe Biden is making truth-telling his badge against his display of precipitous cognitive degeneration. No, he doesn’t debate as well as he used to, he angrily spat out at a rally on Friday, but “I know what I do know — I know how to tell the truth!"
And the media are there for him, regurgitating the new White House talking points. Joe Biden may be mentally incapacitated, but he’s a truth-teller, unlike Trump, they claim.
“The ex-president got away with a torrent of lies,” wrote a CNN senior reporter. That phrase is garnering mentions on Google.
All of this to say: My first column has aged well.
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Mike Gonzalez serves as a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is listed for identification purposes only. No endorsement of a candidate by the organization is implied.
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