President Joe Biden’s prevarication has gotten bad enough that he’s earned a new nickname, this one from Piers Morgan:
“Pinocchio Joe.”
It’s certainly not an inapt moniker. Biden has long been a out-and-out liar, but the establishment media have tended to cover for him in various ways. (My all-time personal favorite attempt to justify Joe’s fabrications came from a 2010 profile in The Atlantic by Mark Bowden, in which the writer said the then-vice president “has the limber storyteller’s tendency to stretch.”)
However, just over a week ago, the president seems to have crossed a line even the establishment media wasn’t willing to give him slack when he lied about being at Ground Zero the day after the 9/11 attacks.
“I join you on this solemn day to renew our sacred vow: Never forget,” he told service members and first responders in a Sept. 11 speech at a military base in Alaska, according to CNN.
“Never forget. We never forget … 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, it looked so devastating because of the way – from where you could stand.”
Incorrect. As CNN noted: “He actually went to Ground Zero nine days after the attacks.”
That kind of admission is pretty stunning from the network. As Morgan put it in his Monday New York Post column — with the brutally factual title “President Pinocchio Joe is a truly terrible liar”:
“CNN, my former employer, has bent over into positions even the Kama Sutra hasn’t thought of in a concerted effort to paint Biden as a beacon of honesty sent to rescue America from fork-tongued Donald Trump.
“But even CNN’s given up,” Morgan wrote.
“Last week, after Biden brazenly and shamefully lied about being at Ground Zero the day after 9/11, CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale unleashed a devastating critique that directly accused the president of having an ‘unfortunate pattern, at this point, of either inventing or embellishing stories about his own past, his biography — he did it three times in one speech last month alone!’
“Dale then cited a long list of Biden’s lies, which included him claiming to have witnessed the collapse of a bridge in Pittsburgh last year when it collapsed hours before he arrived in the city; claiming to have visited a synagogue in the same city after worshippers were killed in a mass shooting in 2018 when he was never there at all; and claiming his grandfather died a few days before he was born at the same hospital when in fact he’d died a year before at a different hospital in a different state.”
Now, there were issues with Dale’s unusual honesty regarding Biden’s prevarications. As Morgan noted, he never actually used the word “lie” to describe any of it. (Not that this is uncommon; just before the 9/11 whopper, Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler also euphemized Biden’s lying about a house fire to victims of the wildfires on Maui as “embellishing his personal tales in ways that cannot be verified or are directly refuted by contemporary accounts.” Which is a 17-word way of saying “lying” without saying “lying.”)
But that’s not the only issue Morgan had with Dale’s critique: “Second, by using the qualifying words ‘at this point,’ he suggests this is some new habit Biden’s only recently developed.”
As regular followers of the president know, “the limber storyteller’s tendency to stretch” stretches all the way back through Pinocchio Joe’s career: “Joe Biden is a terrible liar in every sense; he lies on a terrible scale, and he’s terrible at lying,” Morgan noted.
“He’s always done it,” Morgan said. “And when he’s come up with a good new lie to improve his image, he has no compunction about repeating it myriad times, sometimes for decades.”
Take his repeated lie about getting arrested in apartheid South Africa while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison (which just happened to be hundreds of miles away from where Biden claims he was detained). Or his lies about Angelo Negri, the Amtrak conductor who told him he’d traveled more miles on the rails than he had on Air Force Two as vice president. Slight problem: Negri would have been dead by the time the story could have been factual, and had retired from Amtrak decades before anyhow.
Or take Biden’s lies about being a truck driver. Or about being involved in the civil rights movement. Or … well, really, about almost anything he speaks at length about.
Some lies are more damaging than others, however, as Morgan noted — particularly the “oft-repeated false claims that the driver of the other car in the accident that tragically killed his first wife and baby daughter was drunk — he wasn’t — and that his war hero son Beau died serving his country in Iraq when, as everyone knows, he very sadly died from brain cancer in the US.
“President Pinocchio lies just as easily about policy decisions, like saying with a straight face that the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal was a big success, and pretending the southern border is secure when it’s a porous, deadly fiasco,” Morgan wrote.
“And he’s currently engaged in the biggest ongoing lie of all, which is his preposterous insistence that he never once spoke to his surviving son, Hunter, about his corrupt business deals.”
But, to the CNNs of the establishment media world who are suddenly willing to confront Biden over his obvious and offensive lies regarding 9/11, Hunter is going to be off-limits. Listen to or read any mainstream outlet when it comes to the impeachment inquiry in the House: This is all preposterous nonsense and there’s no evidence linking the president to Hunter’s multifarious overseas business dealings. I mean, except for the evidence that does, but that’ll be ignored.
President Pinocchio. Hey, if the nose fits, wear it.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
