Uncle Joe has largely remained hunkered down in his basement during the pandemic, but at least he’s set up a studio where he can record videos, along with his new podcast. You’d think a comfortable, controlled environment like that would be ideal for someone who tends to be prone to gaffes and “senior moments.” After all, you can rehearse what you plan to say in advance, have your staff review the material for you and edit out any embarrassing bits. And yet, Joe Biden still manages to put his foot in his mouth to the point where even the normally Democrat-friendly fact-checkers are forced to set him straight.

The Free Beacon posted the highlights of Team Biden’s latest whoppers, noting that he’s collected a total of eleven Pinocchios from the Washington Post in just the past few weeks. When it wasn’t Biden himself “misspeaking” it was one of his aides. And these were all completely avoidable errors on the part of Biden’s team.

Another Post fact check on March 24 gave the campaign four Pinocchios after adviser Ron Klain accused Trump of silencing Dr. Nancy Messonnier of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The president and the White House sent a clear message to scientists in the government—there would be a price for speaking out and speaking up,” he said in a campaign video released on March 21. Messonnier continued to hold routine phone briefings with reporters in the weeks after she raised the alarm about the virus at a press conference with Trump. Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote that Klain’s framing was “simply wrong.” Messonnier’s alarming rhetoric did irritate Trump, but the idea that she was silenced was a “false narrative,” Kessler added.

Ed Morrissey took note of the growing list of falsehoods earlier this week, but the volume of self-owns for Team Biden continues to grow. Biden collected three Pinocchios for his previous claim that Trump had “eliminated the White House pandemic office.”

Joe earned a “mostly false” rating for claiming that President Trump had “refused coronavirus testing kits from the World Health Organization.” He earned an additional four Pinocchios for the two campaign videos he released suggesting that Trump had called the virus “a hoax.” (That one still gets repeated on the air by liberals looking to undermine the President’s response to the virus.)

Normally, the revelation that a politician has told a lie or misstated their facts would be about as surprising as seeing rain in the forecast for Seattle. But we’re really no longer in “normal” times these days, are we? For someone who has been through as many political campaigns as Joe Biden has run in his career and given how long he’s had to assemble and grow accustomed to a top-flight staff, you’d expect a much smoother running operation. With that in mind, it’s worth asking whether these were deliberate choices to put out misleading statements intended to build a narrative while trusting that most of the mainstream media would sweep them under the rug. (Which they largely have. Aside from the occasional fact-checking column, you rarely hear these things mentioned.)

The other possibility is that Biden isn’t lying at all. Perhaps he honestly believes the things he says, at least at the moment. If that’s the case, we’re back to the same nagging questions that have been dogging Biden since he launched this campaign. Is he still sharp enough for the job he’s seeking or have his “senior moments” begun evolving into something more worrisome?

The peanut gallery has been buzzing for a while now with suggestions of something that would normally be unthinkable at this point in a presidential campaign. Are Biden’s antics becoming such a liability at this point that the DNC is actually considering pulling the plug on his nomination and swapping him out in favor of someone else? I still don’t think Biden’s ego would allow him to go gently into that good night. But if enough committee members turn sour on him, he may not have any choice in the matter.