Joe Biden, Serial Liar

Our president isn't just a yarn spinner, he routinely repeats lies about very consequential things.

For some, history liberates, for others, it binds. It can inform and guide, preventing the repetition of mistakes and serving as a gateway to the future but it can also become a mechanism to explain failure or use as a weapon. It becomes an excuse for who they have become.

Willful disregard of history can lead to mythmaking as a defense mechanism against failure. People can also become so bound by these myths, believing things that never happened, they simply cannot break free of the fiction that has been created by or for them.

If you have children, you probably have experienced the mythmaking. I can remember when my youngest son, Rob, was four or five and we were on vacation with my mother and father-in-law down in the Canyon Country of Utah. While we were driving from Moab to Brice Canyon, Rob saw something his pre-school mind thought was a coyote (in his story it was called a “cow-dough-tee”) and his grandfather began to question him and egg him on by making suggestions and for the next half hour, the most incredible (and funny) story was spun. None of it happened, of course, and I’m not sure that he had ever seen a coyote. We are not sure what Rob actually saw but his innocent little mind was so open to suggestion and immature enough to consider anything else, so that story was as real to him as the red rock canyons we were driving through.

I couldn’t help but think about Rob’s “cow-dough-tee” story as I listened to about ten minutes of Joe Biden’s speech commemorating the January 6th incident at the Capitol complex yesterday. What struck me about the speech were the blatant lies so easily offered as truth about that event. Last night I looked at the transcript to confirm what I was hearing.

Biden recounted personal anecdotes that were tailored to cast the police as fighting against an invading horde from behind barricades, saying several times the Capitol was “breached”.

We know from the few videos that were released, many of the protesters were let into the complex by Capitol Police through open doors and opened barricades. We also know the overwhelming majority of charges from the riot have been for illegal “parading” and trespassing.

Biden told a self-serving and completely unverified story about comments made to him at the G7 summit a few weeks after the riot.

”…it was in February; it was in England — and I sat next to the President of France, across from the Chancellor from Germany, et cetera.  And I said, ‘America is back.’  You know what the response was?  Not a joke.  “For how long?’  “For how long?’”

Given Biden’s propensity to invent events, how can anyone take this seriously?

Biden constantly made references to make the crowd appear armed when there is no evidence any of the so called “insurrectionists” possessed arms of any shape or form.

The thing I found the most dishonest and disgusting, especially coming from a President of the United States, Joe Biden, this shameless husk of a man, continuously conjured the image that Capitol Police died in the riot – and not only died, were willfully killed by the rioters:

“So, folks, what these people and the people representing those who couldn’t be here because they gave their lives for this did is incredibly consequential.  And that’s not political talk.  That’s a historical fact.”

“Others are gone forever.”

“And I said earlier, if I can hold a minute here — I said earlier: You know, for those who lost someone on that day…”

“So to all the families here — all the families here who lost someone, my heart aches for you…”

“…including Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who will be receiving this medal posthumously.  A veteran of the New Jersey Air National Guard.  Thirteen years on the Capitol Police force as an officer.  He lost his life after protecting the citadel of democracy.”

“Capitol Police Officer Howard Liebengood, who’s receiving this medal posthumously…[he] patrolled the grounds outside the Senate office building on January 6th.  He worked nearly non-stop in the days that followed.  And he lost his life after protecting the democratic institutions he’d learned to revere growing up.”

“…Metropolitan Police Officer — Department Officer Jeffrey Smith, who will be receiving this medal posthumously as well. He was part of the first line of officers who entered when the Capitol was breached.  Assaulted many times, the last time with a metal pipe.”

Sicknick died of a stroke after the riot. Liebengood and Smith committed suicide.

The only person to die as a direct result of the riot was Ashlii Babbit, an unarmed protester who was shot, without warning, by an officer who had been disciplined for leaving his loaded service weapon in a public restroom.

This sick myth has been pushed on Twitter by Robert Reich and from the podium by the Democrats’ new leader, Hakeem Jeffries, both of whom have stated, unequivocally, that people died on January 6th.

It was a riot, that much is true. It should not have happened but was not what is being portrayed.

This was not the British setting fire to the White House in 1814. It is not Frank Holt, a Columbia professor, setting off three sticks of dynamite in 1915. It is not 1954, when five Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire from the House gallery. It was not 1971 or 1983, when radical groups set off explosives in the Senate building.

And yet, the events of January 6, 2021, have been inflated to such levels.

This a sickening, dangerous, divisive myth that people use to claim virtue when they have none.