President Joe Biden traveled to Poland this week to meet with leaders and humanitarian workers working to facilitate the crush of refugees flooding across the border from war-torn Ukraine.
Biden also visited U.S. troops that have been moved near Poland’s border with Ukraine to assist with the refugee crisis and appeared to inadvertently hint that they’d be sent into Ukraine. He also told them a patently false personal anecdote that he’s flubbed on more than one occasion — and over which he has been debunked each time.
In other words, as our service members and their loved ones — not to mention the whole of the western world — wait on edge to see if the United States might enter the conflict and potentially prompt the beginning of WWIII, Biden blissfully lied to the faces of the troops he was clumsily trying to signal his support for.
While discussing the service and sacrifice of the troops over the last several decades, whom he quite rightly identified as the “finest fighting force in the history of the world,” he talked, as is his wont, about his own connections to the military and experiences visiting with service members and U.S. bases in the Middle East.
“The second time I’ve flew in — I’ve been in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan about 40 times — 30-something times — 38 times,” he told members of the 82nd Airborne on Friday.
Biden: “I’ve been in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan about 40 times, 38 times.”
Biden has only been 21 times, according to the Washington Post. pic.twitter.com/IcnK0DB9Pj
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 25, 2022
In reality, Biden only traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan 21 times during his decades in the Senate and his time as President Barack Obama’s Vice President, as PolitiFact noted after the State of the Union address last month when he reportedly went off script and said he’d been to Iraq and Afghanistan over 40 times.
“I’ve been in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan over 40 times,” he remarked to the joint session of Congress.
That’s right — just weeks ago, during the most important executive speech of the year and while the Ukraine crisis was unfolding in Europe, Biden doubled a figure that was meant to be reflective of his experience visiting active American military operations overseas. Then, when he was visiting our troops overseas, just 60 miles away from the makings of the next great western military conflict, he cited the false figure again.
This came, by the way, right after he greeted the members of the division, which specializes in parachute operations, by quipping, “Don’t jump. You guys are used to jumping. Don’t jump.”
Biden at his best, clearly.
“Biden has traveled to Afghanistan and Iraq many times, including to visit his son who was serving in Iraq. But his statement nearly doubled the number of trips. And it’s not the first time Biden has embellished the number of times he’s traveled to the two countries,” PolitiFact reported on Mar. 6.
No, it’s not the first time.
In 2019, as Biden was campaigning for president, The Washington Post reported on the “moving but false war story” he told a New Hampshire crowd about one of his many trips to Afghanistan, which he so muddled up with several different incidents and falsities, it was rendered entirely untrue.
“This is the God’s truth,” Biden told the crowd after a heart-wrenching retelling of having (supposedly) traveled into the Konar province to pin a silver star on a heroic officer who had risked his life to save a fallen brother who shouted at him not to do it because the fellow warrior had died.
“My word as a Biden,” he declared.
It wasn’t, as it happens, God’s honest truth, as the campaign was ultimately forced to confirm.
The Post noted matter-of-factly at the time that “almost every detail in the story appears to be incorrect.”
“Based on interviews with more than a dozen U.S. troops, their commanders and Biden campaign officials, it appears as though the former vice president has jumbled elements of at least three actual events into one story of bravery, compassion and regret that never happened,” the newspaper reported.
While giving these remarks, he also told the crowd that he had been “in and out of Afghanistan and Iraq over 30 times,” which the campaign later clarified was just 21.
It seems rather fitting for Biden to have invoked his “word as a Biden” while blatantly lying to voters. But claiming it was God’s honest truth is far more problematic, not to mention it is conveying such falsities to the men and women he might soon be sending into a war zone to die defending a country that is not their own.
President Joe Biden has a problem with telling fake stories. He has dramatically exaggerated an incident in which First Lady Jill Biden was once caught in a house fire, which was, in reality, a small, quickly contained blaze that posed no threat to Mrs. Biden.
He has also, on more than one occasion, told a story about a conversation with an Amtrak employee that has been likewise debunked each time, yet he keeps telling it anyway.
President Donald Trump was known for his hyperbole and larger-than-life manner of speech, prompting many a needling fact-check during his time campaigning and serving in office.
Now, you may dislike the former president’s penchant for exaggeration and even consider him a flat-out liar, but do you ever remember him completely fabricating entire stories and telling them over and over?
I certainly don’t. (Although I do recall more than one incident in which members of the press were called out for circulating stories that would later be debunked. But I digress).
Let’s just, at the very least here, apply the same standard to Biden that was so often applied to Trump: Here he is, addressing our military in a time of great crisis which could ultimately result in a call upon thousands of our own troops to the front … and he can’t even get facts straight that he’s been called out for on multiple occasions?
To say this doesn’t inspire confidence would be the understatement of the century.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
