Joe Biden's weird relationship with the truth

"I'll unpublish any responses that skip the Biden query and launch into a Palin attack."

How about responses that compare Biden's lies to McCain's, or Bush's?

Rod, I'll be real honest with you. I just don't care. The GOP has had the run of the town since 1994 with control of one or the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue (or for many years, both ends) and we are in a mess. Economically we are screwed. We are losing the war in Afghanistan (the REAL response to 9/11). We are taking on debt like the Titanic took on water.

Our country is in a mess, and the issue of Biden lying comes up. So what? McCain has lied numerous times during the campaign. And don't get me started on Bush's lies (unless you want to argue that is campaign's statements in 2000 about McCain's sanity have any credence).

To me, and to many other Americans, this is a non-issue. Here in Iowa the latest poll shows Obama/Biden leading by 18 points. Nationally he leads by 4-6 points, and is slowly pulling away. Yes, that can change in October, but it tells you that at this time PEOPLE DO NOT CARE about Biden's lies.

Rod, folks are standing in mud up to their waists (and here in Iowa there are STILL some towns cleaning up from this summer's flooding where that is a literal truth), and you are complaining about some weeds growing in the corner.

I lived in Delaware for 22 years, and am all too aware of Joe's habits. First of all, the guy just can't resist the sound of his own voice, i.e. he's a blowhard. More importantly, all thorugh his career, he's distributed the same 'carelessness' with the truth, something I'd consider downright contempt for the truth. He just doesn't think those details matter. Watch him: even if he's caught red-bloody-handed he'll try to gasbag his way out of it. To be honest, I also think he exaggerates his own importance because for all his years of service, he's been wrong on the most important foreign policy decisions of our times. So I think he cannot resist the urge to ginger up his record and profile from time to time.

Interesting question. I really like Joe Biden, I think for some of the reasons you like Palin--he reminds me of my middle-class Irish Catholic family, my uncles who told exaggerated stories. So when I see something like this, my tendency is to think, "Oh, Joe. Not again!" and shrug amusedly. But I have been driven crazy by what I've seen as similar puffing of stories by Palin (this reference isn't meant to break your rule about comments). So yet again, Rod, you've pointed out to me where my biases lie. Thanks, honestly, for this.

So now, from my more clear-eyed state, I'd say yes, this bothers me, and I would like to hear Biden answer this question. I don't know why he puffs like this, and I wish he'd stop--if not for any other reason but that his real, true stories are plenty good enough.

I was going to write a long post here, but melia pretty much spoke for me.

So now, from my more clear-eyed state, I'd say yes, this bothers me, and I would like to hear Biden answer this question. I don't know why he puffs like this, and I wish he'd stop--if not for any other reason but that his real, true stories are plenty good enough.

And why would you think his answer to this question would be any more truthful or honest than the reason the question needs to be asked in the first place?

Questioner to Liar: Why do you lie and exaggerate the truth?

Liar: Well, because I sometimes feel I have to in order to make myself look better to myself and in your eyes and to cover up my mistakes, hoping you won't remain interested enough to connect the dots. Next question?

Questioner: Were you shot at in Iraq?

Liar: Why, yes. It was a nerve-wracking experience. By the way, did I tell you about my hairplugs?

Not only is Biden a serial fabulist, he also has a strangely "intellectually incurious" view of history. For example, he thinks FDR was president in 1929 and that America had television back then.

I'm a Democrat, an Obama supporter, and I think Joe Biden is very intelligent. That said, I've noticed this sort of thing with a lot of politicians on both sides of the aisle, and I wonder about that. I wonder if years of politics and speech making takes a toll on the brain, jumbling facts, dates, stories, so it all runs together.

John McCain did that with his "cross in the dirt" story, which happened not to McCain, but to Solzhenitsyn. Although he never mentioned it in earlier memoirs, now McCain is telling the story in the first-person, and I don't consider it a "lie," really, I think he's visualized that scene so many times that it's part of him now, and he really does think it happened to him.

The same sort of thing happens at reunions with friends--we'll remember selective bits of one event, and sometimes get incidents from several events jumbled into one.

With our politicians, we should probably not nit-pick too much, but be vigilant observers of facts that matter, that truly relate to national security. And politicians like Joe Biden and John McCain should just own up to the fact that a lot of things happen in a lifetime and without consulting a meticulous journal, they're going to misspeak sometimes.

Biden isn't heading the ticket up for the Dems and Palen isn't heading up the other side.
Biden's ideas on dividing up Iraq did make a lot of sense to me a while back. And for all his gaffes and tall tales, he was the one candidate during the primaries to describe Giuliani's style 100% correctly: "(When he speaks he) uses a noun a verb and 911." Plus, Biden made a great crack at a gun lover in one of the Youtube debates regarding that person's mental stability.
I heard Biden was for the bill that made filing bankruptcy harder for the average person. That's not good. I also heard he's got close ties with MBNA in Deleware. That's not good either.
He does have a long record of accomplishments. Hmmm... really it's probably a mixed bag for me.
Honestly, Obama wasn't my first choice to head up the Democratic ticket. Dennis Kucinich was. But Obama to his credit was against the Iraq invasion. And now Obama is raising the bar, at least giving pretty good lip service, to shutting out PACs and lobbyists from Democratic campaigns.
I do know that after the last 7 odd years that I'd take a sock puppet over a Republican.

Independent-Moderate for Obama here. Biden's issue with "truthiness" is not comforting for me, the plagiarism back in the 80s was particularly unnerving. Yet, for this campaign he seems to be more of an exagerater than actually deceiving us in meaningful ways (like WMDs, secret torture prisons, etc). I think his foreign policy chops outweigh my concerns. Its hard to see his exaggerations being worse than Palins, and his capabilities in governance and foreign policy is lightyears ahead of hers.

I want someone to ask Biden about his plagiarism of the British politician. This was not just a case of using some clever phrases from someone else's speech. Biden actually recounted events of another person's life as if they were his own. How can he do that?

Here are some articles with the details.

The Write Stuff?
Why Biden's plagiarism shouldn't be forgotten.
By David Greenberg
http://www.slate.com/id/2198543/

What Kind of Plagiarist Is Joe Biden?
The unusually creepy kind.
By Jack Shafer
http://www.slate.com/id/2198597/

There are a number of ways for politicians to end up looking mendacious.

Firstly, they can be flat out misreported. Gore's statement on the internet falls squarely into this category. He actually claimed, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the internet." Clumsy wording, but his claims have had some backing from Vint Cerf, who is regarded as one of the original inventors of the internet:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000125065813/http://www.mids.org/mn/904/vcerf.html

Secondly, they can misremember things. I'm not sure as to whether Biden's claim about FDR fits into this category. He may have had some notions about FDR's radio addresses to the nation, FDR being the first televised president, and FDR's sponsoring of the New Deal all mixed up in his head. Or he may have crawled into the next category with that one.

Thirdly, politicians can say things they want to have been true, or have convinced themselves are true, without actually attempting to mislead. Sometimes it's just something that makes a good soundbite and they get too carried away to check whether they're certain about it. This is a huge source of gaffes, and is pretty much definitely the case with Biden's latest one. It's surprisingly common to see it in politicians though. For some reason, no-one wants to vote for cold, correct logicians who're willing to admit uncertainty in areas where they haven't done the research or in which the evidence is mixed. So, instead you get politicans who have to insist they're certain about things even when they're not, and this takes its toll until they insist they're certain about things that they didn't know enough about to bring up in the first place.

Fourthly, sometimes they really are deliberately trying to deceive us.

Politicians are flawed people. Nothing is exciting there, as almost everyone is, but someone possessed of both the ambition to make it to the top and principled honesty will have to sacrifice one of those on the altar of the other. Worse than that, in the name of political expediency, over time they will end up making decisions that are contradictory or hypocritical. (Of course, seemingly contradictory decisions can also be made as fresh evidence changes viewpoints. Nothing is ever as simple as reporters like to make it.) If you're really lucky, they'll retain some core principles even as they give way to party peers on things they consider less important - but generally, you don't know this for certain until they resign on a point of principle, and then it's often too late to get them back.

You wouldn't want any of these people exercising power over your life. Not Obama, not McCain, not Bush, nor all the elected members of the Congress. Still, the system manages to work better than most dictatorships or monarchies, even though it must of necessity be driven purely by politics of hate: we end up voting for the lesser evil. And that's the crux of the election - is Palin enough of a burden to stop you voting McCain?

It can be difficult to weight evils appropriately. Vladimir Putin is, from the perspective of a believer in the free press, a great evil. He is also a ferociously competent Machiavelli of a leader, and Russia has prospered under him. Many Russians seem willing to sacrifice some freedom to have such a man at the helm. Is it worth having your country successful, well-run and orderly if it means electing someone who tramples many of your core beliefs? And would our answer change if we had memories of queuing for rations in freezing weather? I don't know, myself.

Linda said: >>

Actually, that never did happen to Solzhenitsyn. There's a story floating regarding this about Solzhenitsyn, but doesn't appear to have come from him.

And McCain first mentioned it in his 1999 book.

FactCheck.org has a page on this whole thing.

And with Biden, well, it definitely seems to be a pattern. The John Kerry exchange, being shot at in Iraq, being "forced down" by the enemy in Afghanistan, saying the accident which claimed the life of his wife and daughter were caused by a man who drank his lunch, plagiarism, etc...

And as for his intellectual brilliance with foreign policy, well I can only offer his post-9/11 plan he threw out to his staffers:

"Seems to me this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran," (from an article in the New Republic)

Yeah that's a good plan.

From the same article:

>>

Something to consider.

Unfortunately he's also legendary for speaking impulsively and leaving others to clean up the mess. "He lacks the filter," says one Democratic strategist. Or as a senior Senate foreign policy aide put it: "Biden is an unguided missile." Not exactly the persona you want out front when the country is at war.

I believe I remember the Joe Biden character from Dr. Strangelove.

"Or as a senior Senate foreign policy aide put it: "Biden is an unguided missile." Not exactly the persona you want out front when the country is at war."

You mean like we have had the past 7+ years?

Having read the other comments, I would like to add two more clarifications:

-- Biden only said, on several occasions, that he had been *told* the other driver involved in his wife's death had been "drinking his lunch" and had no reason to doubt, and in fact believed it, until the other driver's family protested (only after the man's death). He has not mentioned that detail since learning that it was possibly untrue.

-- The 'plagarism' of Neil Kinnock was not plagarism. He took a particular "riff" ("Why am I the first Kinnock to go to university?" etc.) and filling in - accurately - details of his own life. On one occasion he failed to reference Kinnock in doing so and a tape of that was circulated among the press by a Dukakis staffer. There are at least five tapes of Biden using the same "riff" on previous occasions and expressly CITING Kinnock. (In these days of many videocams and YouTube the other tapes would have been up immediately; in 1988 it took a week or two to get evidence that it was his practice to cite Kinnock.) That is not plagarism; it is at most sloppiness or momentary forgetfulness. And there are many articles discussing the fact that it was not plagarism.

And isn't it interesting that after 30+ years in public life, the people responding here can only come up with the same two or three supposed misstatements? If you have been around people who are required to absorb a lot of information rapidly and speak about many different topics very frequently, I think you would find very similar skipping or muddling details.

What makes Biden stand out, I think, are the quite different times when he states very uncomfortable truths very boldly (the man caressing his automatic weapon "has a problem" - Obama is a "clean, articulate" person - there are many Indians and Pakistanis working in convenience stores - etc.) If it weren't for THOSE statements (which aren't in the least untrue) and the unjustified plagarism charge, no one would pay attention to the other things that have been mentioned.

I consider him, and have long considered him, to be one of the most *honest* politicians, whatever the Conventional Wisdom or commonly-accepted story may be. Nothing I've read here makes me question that conclusion. ---- Sadly, I used to put John McCain in that same category, but that isn't possible any longer.