“We finally beat Medicare.”
That was just one of the many astonishing things that President Joe Biden said, or tried to say, in his Thursday night face-off with President Donald Trump.
The de facto Democrat and Republican standard bearers parried for 90 minutes on CNN. The normally rabid, Trump-hating moderators, Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, rose to the occasion and asked both candidates tough, fair, and relevant questions. The opponents debated each other, not the anchors. Three cheers for that.
(Illustration courtesy of Jesse Singal, its creator, via Chat GPT)
Biden earned zero cheers, however, for his many lies. Three slices of disinformation were especially egregious:
First, Biden said, “I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any this—this decade, that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world, like he [Trump] did.”
This is totally false. Just ask Biden.
“Jill and I join the families and friends of our fallen—and Americans across the country—in grieving the loss of these warriors in this despicable and wholly unjust attack,” Biden declared after three U.S. GIs were killed, and 34 wounded, in a Jan. 28 assault in Jordan. Biden added: “While we are still gathering the facts of this attack, we know it was carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in Syria and Iraq.”
Biden’s lie also erased the 13 Marines whom a terrorist suicide bomber murdered outside Kabul’s airport during Biden’s shambolic Afghan retreat in August 2021. Things most assuredly would have gone far less fatally had a reelected President Trump exited, as he said, “with dignity, with strength, with power.”
Second—regarding Charlottesville, Virginia’s race riots—Biden asked: “What American president would ever say, Nazis coming out of fields, carrying torches, singing the same anti-Semitic bile, carrying swastikas, were ‘fine people’?”
Snopes’ non-mega-MAGA fact-checkers demolished this lie.
“No, Trump Did Not Call Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ‘Very Fine People,’” Snopes announced June 20. It rated this claim “False.”
Trump told journalists on Aug. 15, 2017: “But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides,” some of whom wished to preserve a local statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, and others who wanted it gone. Biden deliberately conceals Trump’s key sentence, in the same answer, 49 seconds later:
“I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”
Trump’s words—“condemned totally”—turn Biden’s beloved “very fine people” talking point into a total lie.
Third, Biden said, “I was recently in France for D-Day … I went to the World War II cemetery—World War I cemetery he [Trump] refused to go to. He was standing with his four-star general, and he told him—he said, ‘I don’t want to go in there because they’re a bunch of losers and suckers.’ My son who served in Iraq was not a loser. He was not a sucker. You’re the sucker. You’re the loser.”
Biden keeps repeating this lie despite the work of yours truly and other journalists who dismantled Jeffrey Goldberg’s lie-clogged “story” in Sept. 3, 2020’s The Atlantic.
In short, Goldberg cited four anonymous sources who claimed that Trump avoided honoring these fallen American soldiers from the Great War because they were “losers” and “suckers,” and he did not want the rain to moisten his hair.
My 16 named sources accompanied Trump in Paris. They said, on the record, that Trump never called these war dead “losers” or “suckers.” Trump’s military aides scotched the cemetery stop due to rain and low clouds. The Secret Service’s safety and logistical concerns nixed helicopter and motorcade travel.
Trump postponed his Nov. 11, 2018, departure so he could visit the Suresnes American Cemetery near Paris. He laid a wreath there and inspected soldiers’ graves—in the rain.
Sources: Murdock 16, Goldberg 4.
Biden earned the Democrat nomination, fair and square, and has every right to run for reelection. He should do so without lying to the American people.
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