Once again, President Joe Biden has exposed himself as either a confused old man or a habitual liar. Trying to determine which of these defects best explains his frequent misstatements and malignant falsehoods can leave one's head spinning.
At two different stops in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, Biden gave an account of his uncle's death in World War II, including a bizarre and irrelevant mention of cannibalism in the South Pacific that did not square with the official record on several key points.
Remarkably, the president's strange tale even caught the establishment media's attention.
On Wednesday morning, according to photojournalist Al Drago, Biden stopped by the Veterans War Memorial in Scranton, Pennsylvania. There, the president paid respects to his uncle, 2nd. Lt. Ambrose J. Finnegan Jr.
President Joe Biden pays respects to his uncle, World War II veteran Ambrose J, Finnegan, Jr., at the Veterans War Memorial in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on Wednesday. pic.twitter.com/8gULgL6utl
— Al Drago (@Al_Drago) April 17, 2024
Afterward, as he prepared to depart for Pittsburgh, Biden spoke to reporters.
"He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time," the president said, referring to Finnegan's death on May 14, 1944, in a clip posted to the social media platform X.
Biden then used that story as an excuse to launch another slanderous attack on former President Donald Trump.
"And what I was thinking about, when I was standing there," the president said of his time at the memorial, "was when Trump refused to go up to the memorial for veterans in Paris, and he said they're a bunch of suckers and losers."
Biden, of course, referred to a September 2020 report in The Atlantic, which cited four "senior staff members" in the Trump administration who claimed that the former president denigrated nearly 1,800 U.S. Marines who lost their lives in World War I by referring to them as "suckers" and "losers."
"What animal would say such a thing?" Trump said in denying the report at a 2020 rally.
Even the notorious, Trump-hating warmonger John Bolton, former National Security Advisor to the 45th president, dismissed the report as false.
Imagine using your uncle's wartime death to launch a disgraceful political attack rooted in an inconceivable lie. Who would do such a thing? A cognitively impaired old fool? Or a demonic liar?
Readers may view the 52-second clip of Biden in Scranton below.
Biden tells a story about his grandfather being "shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals" before recounting the debunked "suckers and losers" hoax for the second time in less than a day pic.twitter.com/KufaTlmCz1
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) April 17, 2024
Later in the day, after arriving in Pittsburgh, Biden gave a similar version of the story he told in Scranton.
And that second retelling prompted the establishment media to correct the record.
According to the Associated Press, for instance, Biden again said that Finnegan "got shot down in New Guinea," a place where "there used to be a lot of cannibals."
As the AP noted, however, the Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency has recorded a different version of Finnegan's death.
"Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard," the agency's account read.
In other words, while Finnegan unquestionably died as a hero in World War II's Pacific theater, his death involved neither hostile fire nor cannibals, as Biden claimed.
Furthermore, in Pittsburgh as in Scranton, the president once again showcased his obsession with Trump.
"That man doesn’t deserve to have been the commander in chief for my son, my uncle," Biden said, invoking both his uncle's memory and the memory of his son Beau, an Iraq War veteran who died of brain cancer in 2015.
NBC also corrected the record and noted, for instance, that Biden has a history of misstatements regarding the military service of multiple family members, including his uncle Frank.
Had Biden told the tall tale about Finnegan's death while still in Scranton and then left it at that, one might have felt inclined to chalk it up to another spontaneous mental error from a president whom special counsel Robert Hur described as "an elderly man with a poor memory."
But the fact that Biden used an exaggerated story of his uncle's World War II death as a platform from which to attack Trump, coupled with the fact that Biden repeated both the story and the attack later in Pittsburgh, where the president also mentioned his late son Beau, suggested something far more calculated and diabolical.
