Oh, Joe Biden.
He just never can help but hurt himself whenever he opens his mouth, bless his heart.
Biden is known for his folksy manner of telling little personal anecdotes that supposedly highlight his humanity and relatability, but he has been fact-checked on more than one occasion over the years for, shall we say, overstating the details of these endearing little gems of life experience.
However, he often goes on to repeat the errant stories despite the previous scrutiny from fact-checkers and critics.
Biden has repeatedly told a story about a friendly Amtrak employee helping him count up the total miles he’d traveled on those well-worn rails, despite the fact that it doesn’t line up with either the worker’s personal history or Biden’s political career.
This time around, he told a recycled yarn about a house fire that he and Jill Biden suffered to people who lost their homes in a destructive Colorado blaze. Thanks to his slight fabrication as to the significance of the fire, Biden sort of undermined rather than emphasized his ability to relate.
According to The Associated Press, a wildfire that struck suburban neighborhoods between Denver and Boulder in late December destroyed over 1,000 homes, causing $513 million in damage.
Biden visited the ravaged community on Friday, where he addressed the victims and a delegation of Colorado lawmakers and offered words of comfort and encouragement, as well as his own previously fact-checked fire story.
“Jill and I have not gone through what you’ve gone through, but we have had lightning strike our home and almost lose our home,” he told the crowd.
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At this point, he seemed to realize that perhaps he needed to walk the comment back a bit, as it’s questionable how true it actually is.
Indeed, the Bidens apparently did not suffer very much at all when lightning struck their home in 2004, as The Associated Press reported at the time. There was a “small fire that was contained to the kitchen” that firefighters had under control in 20 minutes.
Biden tells victims of last week’s Colorado wildfires that he once “had lightning strike our home and almost lose our home.”
That is a lie. According to a 2004 AP report, it was “a small fire…contained to the kitchen” that “was under control in 20 minutes.” pic.twitter.com/cfBDyo6KkT
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 8, 2022
Biden told this story in November and previously in 2013, both times greatly embellishing the damage caused by the fire.
This time, he seems to have been a bit more mindful of his words.
“We only lost about 25 percent of it,” he continued on Friday. “We were able to rebuild. But, you know, the hard part is the memorabilia you lost. The special things that you had put away that you lost.”
This is a new telling of the tale, and Biden seems to have added new details to highlight the tragedy of his story while still falling suspiciously short of telling the full truth.
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In 2013, he said the fire had destroyed a “significant portion” of his home, and in November he said the same.
“I know, having had a house burn down with my wife in it — she got out safely, God willing — that having a significant portion of it burn, I can tell: 10 minutes makes a hell of a difference,” he said on the heels of signing his infrastructure bill.
(He had gone into great detail about his apparent belief that American families are just terribly worried about bridges falling down, delaying the ability of first responders to arrive quickly at the scene of fires.)
The thing is, a “significant portion” of the Biden home didn’t burn down and by all accounts, Mrs. Biden got out safely and was just fine. In 2013, he even highlighted the fact that firefighters had managed to save his wife and his “second-best love,” his ‘67 Corvette. I’m guessing if there was time to ensure that his vehicle was safe, things were probably relatively under control.
It’s rather obnoxious for Biden to over-emphasize a small fire that doesn’t seem to have caused much damage nor seriously threatened anyone’s life or even, it appears, his Corvette.
Over 1,000 families have lost everything and the best he has to offer is a phony story about a kitchen fire? Seems like this would have been a good one to avoid. It’s not just foolish, it’s insulting to the real victims.
Look. We all had to endure four full years of bitter, painstaking scrutiny over every jot and tittle that proceeded from former President Donald Trump’s mouth as well as the wild spin that was put on anything he ever uttered or did.
We’re almost morally obligated at this point to highlight Biden’s prolific blunders, and they are indeed prolific, ranging from forgetting the names of his Cabinet members to frequently losing his train of thought in the middle of public comments on top of telling factually dubious stories and flat-out lies.
The really infuriating thing is that, for as uncouth and fiery as Trump’s comments were admittedly wont to be, if he had displayed even half the fumbling lack of tact that Biden does, Nancy Pelosi would have probably tried to send the Capitol Police to the White House with straitjackets to haul 45 off to a home.
Let’s be real.
Melania Trump wore heels to walk from the White House to Marine One to visit a disaster zone and the mainstream media carped about it for days, but Biden tells a fabricated story to fire victims and there are crickets from the same correspondents.
I think we can safely assume this is why he doesn’t think twice before recycling an already debunked story — he knows the establishment media will never hold him to the same standard to which it held Trump.
Well, we can still hold the mainstream media and Biden to the same standard… and it’s one they absolutely fail to meet.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
