If the 2020 presidential campaign proves anything, it proves that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden again fibbed about his past yesterday, and the fib was the same one that helped wreck his run for the White House in 1987. Biden falsely said he was the first person in his family to attend college.
He wasn’t.
Yet the latest falsehood mirrors others. And it tracks with his mulish insistence on stealing words from other politicians.
No, Joe, You Weren’t the First
Time magazine’s Charlotte Alter tweeted the incriminating line: “Biden: ‘Guys like me, the first in my family to go to college… we are as good as anybody else, and guys like Trump, who inherited everything and squandered what they inherited, are the people I’ve always had a problem with’.”
Biden: “Guys like me, the first in my family to go to college… we are as good as anybody else, and guys like Trump, who inherited everything and squandered what they inherited, are the people I’ve always had a problem with”
— Charlotte Alter (@CharlotteAlter) September 18, 2020
As The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway quickly noted, Biden said the same thing 33 years ago, when he not only inserted details from then British Labour leader Neil Kinnock into his life but also shamelessly stole material from Kinnock’s speeches.
Kinnock: “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys [his wife] the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because all our predecessors were thick?’’
Biden: “Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I’m the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?”
Biden then confessed the lie and his plagiarism, which included stealing material from a law review article.
And as Hemingway observed, when a voter in New Hampshire asked Biden about his academic record, Biden fumed that he had a higher IQ than the voter. That likely would have been fine if Biden had stopped there. But he couldn’t resist embellishing his lackluster academic record:
Said Biden:
I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect. I went to law school on a full academic scholarship, the only one in my — in my class to have a full academic scholarship. In the first year in law school I decided didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class, and then decided I wanted to stay, went back to law school, and in fact ended up in the top half of my class. I won the international moot-court competition. I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year. I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits — I only needed 123 credits. And I’d be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours if you’d like Frank.
That was false in almost every detail, the Federalist writer reported. Biden received a half scholarship (because of financial need, not academics), there’s no record of him winning a moot court competition, he did not receive the outstanding student award, and he finished in the bottom half of his class. Degrees received? One.
Given Biden’s obviously diminished mental acuity, he might not recall what happened. Last time he peddled the Horatio Algeresque yarn, after all, was three decades ago.
Time’s Alter can be excused for not recognizing the falsehood. She was born three years after Biden withdrew from 1987’s presidential contest.
Cribbing a Canadian
Just weeks ago, Biden was caught plagiarizing from the late Canadian politician Jack Layton, and his campaign henchman heisted material verbatim from a climate-activist website for the candidate’s education and environment proposals. Maybe his education plan should include funding to train journalism students how to cover elderly politicains with a long record.
Biden’s reprising the falsehood about college isn’t his first flat-out falsehood about his past this campaign.
Hoping to secure support from The Sisterhood, Biden now claims he didn’t give a fair hearing to Anita Hill when she lodged 11th-hour sexual harassment charges against then U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991.
Biden did give Hill a fair hearing, the record shows. Beyond that fib, he just couldn’t resist adding this whopper for the ladies on The View: “I believed her from the beginning. I was against Clarence Thomas. I did everything in my power to defeat Clarence Thomas.”
No, he didn’t.
Biden told his colleagues on the Judiciary Committee that he did not believe Hill, which the late Senator Arlen Specter, the liberal Republican from Pennsylvania, reported in his memoir.
Said Biden, “It was clear to me from the way she was answering the questions she was lying.”
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