Joe Biden has told a lot of falsehoods over his career, and there’s been no shortage of them during his presidency. In fact, there have been so many of them that I once spent hours chronicling the ones he’s told the most only to find that I didn’t have the energy to finish the job.
Still, the list I did compile more than made the point. For example, who can forget the tale of “Uncle Frank?” According to Biden, he gave his uncle a purple heart as vice president. The problem? Uncle Frank died in 1999. But perhaps he meant he gave it to him posthumously? Well, that would make sense if Biden had described in detail what Uncle Frank said at the supposed ceremony.
But while many of the fibs Biden tells are mostly harmless (though wrong all the same) there’s one story he has repeated dozens of times that hits a lot harder. It involves his son Beau Biden, who tragically passed of cancer in 2015.
For reasons still not completely clear, the president has routinely claimed, either directly or via unmistakable implication, that his son actually died while serving in Iraq. The repeating of that falsehood became scandalous recently when Gold Star families who lost loved ones during the Afghanistan withdrawal revealed that Biden had told them the same story.
Here are the words of Cheryl Rex, whose son Lance Cpl. Dylan Merola fell victim to a Kabul suicide bombing during the evacuation.
When Joe Biden, our elected president, entered the room, when he approached me, his words to me were, “My wife Jill and I know how you feel. We lost our son as well, and brought him home in a flag-draped coffin.”
My heart started beating faster and I started shaking, knowing that their son died from cancer and they were able to be by his side. Also, wondering how someone could honestly (tears up and pauses), sorry, be so heartless to say he knew how I felt a little over 24 hours of learning of my son’s death.
Following that latest episode, it appears that Joe Biden’s handlers have gotten the message. During an appearance in Utah on Thursday, the president finally changed the story to more accurately reflect reality.
BIDEN: This is not about my son, but this is an example of how close it was. My son Beau was one of (inaudible) perished. He went, the fittest guy in his unit, and came home in (long pause)…he came home but died of glioblastoma.
When you watch the video, it sounds like he was about to make the “came home in a flag-draped coffin” reference he told the Gold Star family members mentioned above before catching himself. With that said, I can’t prove that so I’m going to assume that he paused mid-sentence because of the weight of what he was talking about. For whatever falsehoods he’s told about the matter, Biden did lose his son, and no one should fault him for reacting emotionally to that.
Regardless, as tragic as losing a child is, that’s not a license to steal valor, and Biden’s past comments about his son dying in Iraq were just that. You can understand a Gold Star mother like Cheryl Rex felt hearing that after having just found out her son was murdered by terrorists.
As to how long this change from Biden lasts, we’ll see.