One of the least impressive aspects of this amazingly inept White House administration is its blithe disregard of truth and enthused embrace of lying. As if uttering an untruth makes what they want come true because they think Americans are dumb enough to fall for it.
Safe to say, most presidents, certainly the modern ones, have failed to live up to George Washington’s fabled inability to tell a lie. And at one time or another — or perhaps several times — told what Mark Twain deliciously called “stretchers.”
Sometimes mainstream media call them out. Not during the Obama administration, of course. But certainly when Republicans are chief executives. During our previous presidency, some media delightedly counted the president’s untruths up into the thousands.
They’re way too busy to do that now naturally, though they’re missing a real opportunity to show their watchdog bona fides with Joe Biden and his crowd.
There are real-life consequences to serial lying. Biden claims his sinking poll numbers (he hit a new career low in Gallup’s most recent survey, the worst of any elected president in his sixth quarter) are because Americans have somehow missed all of his successes.
The truth is more likely that Americans have detected Biden’s chronic lies. And as they do with coworkers and neighbors, they choose not to openly confront the liar. They just file it away for recall and application to just about everything they hear from him or her.
A recent University of Chicago Institute of Politics poll found a majority of Americans, including two-thirds of Republicans and even 51 percent of liberals, no longer trust their government, saying it is “corrupt and rigged against everyday people like me.”
In recent days, both Saudi Arabia and China declared that Biden’s later descriptions of their separate official conversations, which make him out to sound stern and tough, do not match the reality of what actually occurred.
How bad is it when after 19 interminable months of accumulating Biden lies, you lean toward awarding communists and foreign royalty more credibility than our own commander in chief?
We suspect some of our close but more circumspect allies have had the same experience.
Biden’s habitual inability to speak truth adds to the worsening impression that the man who turns 80 this fall has lost a considerable amount of the limited mental acuity he once had. And the crowd of political sycophants surrounding him does not dare warn him of this for fear of his irascibility or, more likely, losing their positions of power.
Last Thursday, Biden chaired a White House meeting of high-powered CEOs to hear their reads on markets and consumer habits these days. At one point, the president interrupted to share a personal reminiscence:
Well, you know, one of the things that — my father was in the automobile business his whole life. Ran a major dealership — a General Motors dealership.
None of that is true. Joe Biden Sr. worked for Amoco oil, a maritime water sealant company, then ran into some lean years. He ended up selling used cars and real estate in Delaware.
Junior has made up numerous tales of his personal life, apocryphal bullies, and encounters, law school class rankings, plagiarism, a successful career driving 18-wheelers cross-country.
Last month the president told graduates at the U.S. Naval Academy that he had been admitted there, but the year he mentioned was the same year he graduated from the University of Delaware.
Such claims are so easily verified or debunked that you wonder what, if anything of substance or guilt, goes through Biden’s mind when he makes them so recklessly.
And you wonder what might go through service members’ minds when their commander in chief says it’s necessary for them to go into harm’s way.
Military recruiting has stumbled since Biden became president, meaning the services will either be under-manned or accept lower educational and personal standards. The unemployment rate, a key determinant of volunteers, has been low since so many have left the labor force.
And the Afghan troop withdrawal a year ago was an unmitigated disaster when Biden dismissed Pentagon advice with deadly and tragic consequences.
Usually, around 40 percent of new service volunteers have some connection to the military through relatives. That proportion has been exceptionally hard hit, indicating family resistance now to allowing members to enter a potentially dangerous workforce with such questionable top leadership.
Speaking of Biden and Afghanistan, the president said on national TV last summer that U.S. personnel would stay to evacuate all who wanted out. Soon after, he ended evacuations anyway, leaving thousands behind. Many are still there and being hunted by Taliban security forces using allied personnel files left behind intact.
Biden has pronounced the troop withdrawal a grand success.
Remember on the July 4th holiday last year, Biden had his Mission Accomplished moment regarding COVID, which wasn’t really vanquished? Earlier this month the same man tested positive for the virus. Last week he was released from isolation. In another example of his upside-down world, the man who caught COVID despite four COVID vaccinations touted the importance of vaccinations.
Then, this weekend he tested positive again.
Spinning news is one thing. Distorting it is another. A week ago, Biden assured Americans an economic recession was not in the cards. Three days later after new data showed a recession was indeed underway, he said it was “no surprise.”
When additional seriously adverse economic data emerged showing the U.S. had officially entered a recession, the president announced that the numbers instead proved the economy was “on the right path.”
This was a blatant lie, further proof Biden was disconnected from a reality everyone else saw, or conceivably an accidental admission of where this man really wanted his country to be going.
Janet Yellen, his Treasury secretary, dismissed recession talk, claiming the continued decline in economic growth was “a new phase” of the economic recovery, which just happens to involve decline.
Continuing this administration pattern of gaslighting, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre denounced states busing hundreds of illegal immigrants to Washington and New York City.
Asked how that differed from the Biden administration flying thousands of the same illegal immigrants to mid-sized cities, her non-answer was: “It’s very different, because we’re not using migrants as a political pawn.”
Take all of these examples of obvious lying and gaslighting, and it’s no surprise that so many Americans no longer believe much of what this president says and, thus, approval of his job performance has sunk deep into the 30 percent range. On the way to something even lower.
And unpredictable adverse consequences should, God forbid, Joe Biden ever be called upon to display real leadership in some troubled future time.
