OPINION:
President Biden has been lying about civil rights activism for so long that it spans almost the 80-year-old’s entire political career.
He has a deep psychological need to invent a life he never led.
In the 1980s, he falsely declared, “I marched with tens of thousands of others to change attitudes.”
Forty years later, as president, in Georgia, he twisted an election reform bill into Jim Crow segregation. To impress the crowd, he made up a story.
“I did not walk in the shoes of generations of students who walked these grounds,” he said in Atlanta in January 2022. “But I walked other grounds. Because I’m so damn old, I was there as well. You think I’m kidding, man. It seems like yesterday the first time I got arrested.”
A year later, he said, “I came out of the Civil Rights Movement as a kid, as a public defender.”
It is remarkable that when he sat down to write his 2007 memoir, “Promises to Keep,” his civil rights heroism was left out.
I cannot find a mention of his either being arrested or marching. It seems to me that it would have been a perfect time to describe his heroic involvement as a teenager and 20-something — his high school, college and law school years — from 1954 to 1968.
His civil rights stories are part of the Biden brand. He tells lies about his life in a calculating strategy.
Most in the crowd will believe him, and if the media spends a few lines on fact-checking, who cares. Aides would sometimes clean up the remarks, only to see Mr. Biden say them again.
One reason he has repeated the civil rights lie is that one of his themes as president is that the country is riven with “White supremacists.” They are everywhere, preventing Black Americans from achievement.
Mr. Biden is here to save them.
In a decidedly favorable biography in 2020, as he ran for president, Mr. Biden told “Joe Biden” author Evan Osnos that he was not part of the Civil Rights Movement.
Jules Witcover also wrote a favorable biography of the president, “Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption.”
In it, Mr. Witcover takes a quote from a Washington Post story.
“While he was at it, Biden also responded to recurring allegations that he did not, as he put it, come out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s,” Mr. Witcover wrote.
Mr. Biden: “I was in fact very concerned about the civil rights movement. I was not an activist. I worked at an all-Black swimming pool of the east side of Wilmington. … I was involved, but I was not out marching. … I was a suburbanite kid who got a dose of what was happening to Black Americans.”
Yet after these books, Mr. Biden has repeated the civil rights lie at least three times as president.
Mr. Biden has also reshaped the narrative on two horrible family tragedies to enhance his political ambitions.
As president, he has proclaimed at least twice that his elder son, Beau, died in Iraq. This immediately made Mr. Biden a Gold Star father. Beau Biden died of cancer six years after returning from Iraq where he served in a Delaware National Guard unit as a judge advocate (lawyer).
Mr. Biden’s other great tragedy was the death of his first wife, Neilia, and their baby in a car crash.
In the ensuing years, then-Sen. Biden felt compelled to say the truck driver who crashed into his wife’s station wagon had been drinking.
“He drank his lunch,” he said. But he said he had magnanimously decided not to pursue a case.
On Dec. 21, 1972, two days after the crash, a Delaware deputy attorney general announced the results of a police investigation. The truck driver was sober and blameless. Neilia had a stop sign, not the truck driver.
Mr. Biden must have been aware of this.
Quoting the Wilmington Journal, Mr. Witcover wrote: “When the accident occurred, the driver of the tractor-trailer, Curtis C. Dunn, forty-three, was headed home to Kaolin, Pennsylvania. Two days later, Delaware Deputy Attorney General Jerome O. Herlihy issued a statement absolving the driver of wrongdoing, saying there was no evidence he had been speeding, drinking, or driving a truck with faulty brakes.”
Dunn died in 1999.
The harsh bottom line here is that it made a better story to portray his family and himself as victims of a drunken driver rather than just letting the facts speak for themselves. Neilia drove the station wagon into Dunn’s path.
Other falsehoods abound.
He said he was raised in a Black church in Wilmington and raised by Puerto Ricans.
He said he quit the University of Delaware varsity football because of his devotion to his future wife, Neilia. But he met her when he was a junior at Delaware. He had played a few games of JV ball as a freshman.
His father said he pressed him to quit because of poor grades. There is no evidence that Mr. Biden ever played varsity football as a sophomore, junior or senior.
He has told voters he used to drive an 18-wheeler and received a job offer from an Idaho lumber company. Neither is true.
He said a U.S. senator appointed him to the Naval Academy in 1965. This was impossible, since he graduated that year from the University of Delaware. There is no record of an appointment letter.
And of course, in the current family scandal, he lies about his son Hunter Biden’s cash grabs from unsavory, some criminal, foreigners.
He said he never discussed Hunter’s business deals with his son. Laughable. And he said he was not on the speakerphone in telephone calls with Hunter’s foreign cash daddies. Double-laughable.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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