Photo : Alex Wroblewski ( Getty )

Here’s a fun game to play at home with your friends and loved ones: Is Joe Biden lying, senile, or both?


Hot off the heels of the former vice president getting essentially every detail wrong while retelling one of his favorite war stories, and then denying he got that story wrong, NPR and Iowa Public Radio have a new interview out with Biden today in which Biden stressed that the details are “irrelevant” (his word).

“That has nothing to do with judgment of whether or not you send troops to war, the judgment of whether you bring someone home, the judgment of whether you decide on a healthcare policy,” Biden said of his many gaffes and erroneous statements, which include repeated lies about Medicare for All and what a single-payer healthcare system would look like and do in America.

But because this is Joe Biden giving an interview in the year 2019, he was physically unable to get through the whole thing without saying something that was obviously bullshit. In this interview, Biden said he voted for the authorization of use of military force in Iraq because George W. Bush told him that he wasn’t going to use the AUMF to go to war. Per NPR:

“[Bush] looked me in the eye in the Oval Office. He said he needed the vote to be able to get inspectors into Iraq to determine whether or not Saddam Hussein was engaged in dealing with a nuclear program,” said Biden. “He got them in and before you know it, we had ‘shock and awe.’” Bush’s office denied Biden’s version of events. “I’m sure it’s just an innocent mistake of memory, but this recollection is flat wrong,” said spokesman Freddy Ford in an email to NPR.


Then Biden went on to claim that he came out against the war as soon as it started, but because all of this shit is public record, NPR pointed out that Biden got that wrong, too.

But in multiple public remarks made after the invasion began in 2003, Biden openly supported the effort. Biden publicly said his vote was a mistake as early as 2005, but not immediately when the war began in 2003. “Nine months ago, I voted with my colleagues to give the president of the United States of America the authority to use force, and I would vote that way again today,” Biden said in a speech at the Brookings Institution on July 31, 2003. “It was a right vote then, and it’ll be a correct vote today.”﻿



Remember folks: the details don’t matter.

Make no mistake about it: the fact that the current president has shit for brains is not exactly his worst quality. (That would be the racism, and the alleged sexual assaults, and so on.) But eventually, you’d hope that four years of watching the person who runs the world’s largest economy slowly descend into madness would be thrilling enough for one lifetime. What Joe Biden’s candidacy posits is: isn’t this fun?