OPINION:
Look, we just can’t keep ignoring this stuff: President Biden is a liar. A big ol’ liar. His pants are on fire. That’s how much of a liar our president is.
Mr. Biden is Big Daddy from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Brick can’t stand all the lies, but for Big Daddy, it’s a way of life.
“Mendacity. What do you know about mendacity?” Big Daddy says to Brick, who’s busy getting drunk again, his method of dealing with lies. “I could write a book on it, mendacity. Look at all the lies that I got to put up with. … Boy, I’ve lived with mendacity. Now why can’t you live with it? You’ve got to live with it. There’s nothin’ to live with but mendacity. Is there?”
And that’s Mr. Biden in a nutshell. He’ll gladly live in his little world where he just makes stuff up. Maybe he really believes it. Makes you realize that Jill Biden is committing elder abuse by letting her clearly foggy husband do … anything.
We’re all going to get old, forget things, and perhaps remember things that never were. But Mr. Biden has been doing this for a decade or more, and his latest escapade is one for the record books.
Mr. Biden was in Asia this week for another meaningless G20 meeting. He decided to stay so long that he was in Alaska refueling Air Force One when our country was commemorating the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil: 9/11. He is the first president to skip all commemorative events — ah, the “everyman” president.
In Alaska, Mr. Biden told American troops on Monday that he was at the World Trade Center site in New York the day after the terrorist attacks — but in his autobiography, he states that he was in Washington.
“Ground zero in New York — I remember standing there the next day and looking at the building. And I felt like I was looking through the gates of hell,” Mr. Biden said on the 22nd anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
The 80-year-old president also claimed that he saw the fireball at the Pentagon, caused by a plane that struck America’s military headquarters, from Washington’s Union Station, almost 5 miles away. His autobiography says all he saw was “a brown haze of smoke.”
“It looked so devastating because the way you could, from where you could stand. Shanksville, Pa., the Pentagon in Virginia — I spent many 9/11s in those hallowed grounds to bear witness and remember those we lost,” he went on.
A few minutes later, Mr. Biden claimed he saw the immediate aftermath of American Airlines Flight 77 striking the Pentagon.
“The plume of fire that shot up in the sky and [the] Pentagon — I remember seeing as I got off the Amtrak train on my way to work in the United States Senate,” Mr. Biden said.
For the record, I was at the White House that day — before they evacuated everyone. I remember hearing the Pentagon had been hit, and a Washington Times photographer and I decided to head straight there — eventually slipping through a fence and walking right up to the gaping hole in the E Ring. We didn’t see a thing — walking across the 14th Street Bridge and down the George Washington Memorial Parkway — until we got there.
For the record, in his autobiography, Mr. Biden wrote, “I headed back to the Capitol the next morning” — Sept. 12, 2001.
He didn’t say he went to ground zero. A Gannett report from the day after the attacks opened: “Delaware Sen. Joe Biden spent Wednesday exactly where he wanted — in the U.S. Senate.” C-SPAN footage also shows Mr. Biden giving another bloviating speech.
For the record, it was President George W. Bush who visited the remnants of the World Trade Center two days after the attacks and famously told rescue workers, shouting into a bullhorn: “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
Mr. Biden so wishes he had done that. But he didn’t. Still, in his addled mind, he thinks he did. And he’s more than happy to tell thousands, millions, that he did.
That’d be sad if it weren’t so scary. This guy is running the country. And he’s a liar. No two ways about it.
In this latest lie, though, Mr. Biden is a valor thief. He wasn’t anywhere near ground zero the day after the attacks. That he lies and claims he was a slap in the face to everyone who was really there.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on X @josephcurl.
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