Former Vice President Joe Biden announces his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, April 25, 2019. (Biden Campaign Handout via Reuters)

Harold Schaitberger, president of the AFL-CIO-affiliated International Association of Firefighters, declared at a campaign rally for Joe Biden today that “Joe Biden is genuine. There’s nothing phony or artificial about Joe Biden.”

This is a spectacularly audacious claim about one of Washington’s most notorious BS artists.

A few days ago, Biden declared on The View, “We were asked, what are you proudest of from your administration? You know what I said — he said the same thing as I did. No one single whisper of scandal. That’s because of Barack Obama.”


Perhaps Biden believes there was no whisper of scandal because there was so much shouting about veterans dying while waiting for care at the Department of Veterans Affairs; the “Fast and Furious” gunwalking operation at the ATF; the dysfunctional launch of Healthcare.gov; the Syrian “red line”; Benghazi; the hacking of Office of Personnel Management records; the IRS targeting of conservative and Tea Party groups; other government agencies harassing and targeting the president’s critics; drunkenness and reckless behavior at the U.S. Secret Service . . .

In 2016, he said Trump’s policy in the Middle East would be “to go carpet bomb innocent people.” Whether or not you like Trump’s policies, that is not an accurate description of what Trump proposed on the campaign trail or enacted in office. He’s accused Trump of trying to cut nearly $1 trillion from the Medicare program — not true.


Biden insists that he’s been “referred to for the last 35 years in Washington as Middle-Class Joe,” despite no record of anyone else ever calling him that. He proclaimed that he didn’t “own a single stock or bond . . . I have no savings accounts.” His wife Jill had plenty of stock and bond investments and the couple had five savings accounts in both their names.


In the 2008 vice-presidential debate, he claimed that the U.S. had teamed up with France to kick Syria out of Lebanon, that the U.S. spends more in Iraq in one month than it had in Afghanistan in six or seven years, and cited recently visiting a restaurant that had been out of business for decades.

In the 2012 vice-presidential debate, he suggested that he had voted against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars when he had in voted for them, understated the income level for the Obama tax hikes by $800,000, claimed that no one had told the Obama administration that U.S. diplomatic posts in Libya wanted more security, and claimed that Obamacare had somehow created $716 billion in new funding that was now being applied to Medicare. It had not.


Biden’s penchant for embellishments and half-truths are part of what sank his 1988 campaign, when he wildly exaggerated his academic record. And as Jack Fowler detailed here earlier this year, Biden’s been claiming for years that a drunk driver killed his first wife and daughter, when the investigation found no evidence that the driver had been drinking and that he was not at fault.


You get the idea. There is a great deal that is “phony” about Biden.