When I was a little boy, my father had a special saying if he had any doubt about my truthfulness. Looking me straight in the eye, no blinking, he’d say, “Is that Right Kind?”
That was my last, final, and terminal chance to escape a lie. I could without consequence correct the record then and there and only then and there. If I replied, “Right Kind,” the cement was already setting around my words.
The gravity of that Vow of Veracity was so immensely heavy that I don’t think I ever lied to him about lying. The shame and unknown punishment were just too awful to contemplate.
It seems these days that not many people in our public life experienced similar emotional engravings in honesty. There’s so much Wrong Kind afloat.
I’m not talking about government institutions. Their sheer size and anonymity make any realistic accountability, well, unrealistic. Their decisions and statements by default are sculpted to protect themselves and each other.
Remember Benghazi? Four men serving our country far away paid with their lives, beaten, burned, and blasted to death. And not one single person was held accountable in any way. Not Hillary Clinton, who ran the show. Not Leon Panetta, who was unprepared to protect them or mount a rescue that fiery night.
Not even President Barack Obama, who inexplicably disappeared for those 16 dark hours.
And not Susan Rice who went on all the Sunday shows to recite the same false anti-Muslim video cause. Her punishment: She’s now director of Joe Biden’s Domestic Policy Council.
I’m talking about individuals who should know better. Like our president.
He’s had a tortured history with the truth for decades. Remember how he was near the top of his law school class? He wasn’t. His first presidential campaign came a-cropper when he stole the words of a British politician and spoke them as his own.
His fictitious conversations with a railroad conductor who wasn’t employed when Biden said they talked. Biden’s long career as a long-distance trucker, which he never had.
But recently Joe Biden has taken lying to a whole new subterranean level of dishonesty. He now states things that are blatantly false on their face. Sometimes he even repeats them. And then when he’s questioned about them, Biden denies they ever happened. Which is a new lie on top of the first ones. That’s a compound fracture of Truth.
Despite the existence of transcripts and videotapes.
Here is Biden’s exchange last week with Fox News’ Peter Doocy who was noting that White House aides have had to scurry around to media after numerous Biden appearances and “clarify” what the commander in chief really meant to say because the 79-year-old failed to speak clearly or completely made something up.
Over the years, most of us have witnessed lying politicians. “I am not a crook,” Richard Nixon. “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” Bill Clinton. I knew a conservative operative at the time who said that if Clinton could successfully convince American women that having oral sex is not having sex, then President Clinton deserved a third term.
DOOCY: Big things you say on the world stage keep getting walked back.
BIDEN: What’s getting walked backed?
DOOCY: You told troops they’re going to Ukraine, that the U.S. would use a chemical weapon, and called for regime change in Russia.
BIDEN: None of the three occurred.
In fact, all three did occur on public stages. The exact Biden quote in a major speech in Warsaw was, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
It’s one thing to tell what Mark Twain called “stretchers” in apocryphal anecdotes when you’re a simple senator from the irrelevant state of Delaware.
It’s another to tell whoppers as leader of the free world when your words and decisions can have serious strategic, diplomatic, and political consequences, like calling for the ouster of the president of another superpower.
Calling for Putin’s ouster was, believe it or not, an ad-lib line thrown in near the end of Biden’s speech. Three days later, after aides had time to concoct an excuse, Biden claimed he’d just been so moved by his moral outrage over Putin’s deadly acts.
Soon after, Biden used the occasion of soaring gas prices to pitch his green energy schemes, exaggerating by multiples of 10 the savings for U.S. consumers. Our colleague Nick Arama called him out here on those falsities.
When Putin’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, makes a claim that Russia has not attacked Ukraine, but merely conducted a ”special military operation,” U.S. media do not hesitate to point out the absurdity.
But when it’s Joe Biden, the same crowd pussyfoots around his lying, gliding over the stunners as “misspeaking,” as if they’re mere slips of the aging presidential tongue.
It’s taken 18 months for major news outfits to cover the shocking contents on Hunter Biden’s laptop that clearly show he was using his last name to cash in on foreign dealings, possibly with his father, including million-dollar investments in China that he has yet to divest.
“My son,” Joe Biden has lied, “has not made money in terms of this thing about, what you’re talking about, China.”
Media motivations for this lying-by-omission are pretty clear. Their political sympathies reside with Democrats. Hence, their four years of daily lie-counting by Donald Trump. But having initially dismissed the Biden laptop’s contents as Russian disinformation in a presidential campaign, it’s difficult to admit a mistake if you have no Right Kind conscience.
But why would a political veteran like Joe Biden, who’s witnessed and experienced the bitter, destructive taste of D.C. scandal, utter so many obviously untruthful statements that are so easily disproven?
Two theories seem plausible. In his fractured mental world, aggravated by the inflationary deference his executive office bestows, what Biden says is completely true to him when he says it. This could explain the Doocy exchange. Reality is what Biden says it is. Impervious to change.
Is it conceivable that Joe Biden’s serial screw-ups are the intentional acts of a demented mind?
Many of us have painfully witnessed the distorted mental reality that seizes the mind of a relative infected with dementia. Their reality is what they think it is from moment to moment. It’s immune to correction. And it plays on caregivers’ instinctive sympathy not to argue or challenge that one-person reality.
As our RedState colleague so aptly put it:
The White House is not a nursing home, and a president who can’t think on his feet and lead out front puts his country in an untenable position.
The other theory is that Biden is playing on that sympathy to go largely unquestioned. Since the man has never impressed anyone with his intellectual powers, it seems more likely that unidentified aides are the ones playing on that public sympathy to control him – and, not accidentally, to maintain their positions of power.
These are the unidentified aides or “caregivers” that the president so often openly refers to as “they told me not to take questions” or “they gave me a list of people to call on.”
Given the unattractive executive alternatives of Kamala Harris or Nancy Pelosi – possibly the worst line of U.S. succession ever — no one seems willing to demand a 25th Amendment change from the incumbent.
Not only is there no real leadership from the president. There’s no real leadership anywhere to fix the untenable leadership situation.
There’s just continued national drift. While Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and perhaps others unknown maneuver to take advantage of the void.
And there’s plenty of time for them to do that. As of April 3, we have 1,023 days to endure in Joe Biden’s last term. That does seem endless. But it feels somewhat better than 24,552 hours.
