When Lying Is a Public Outrage, and When It's Just Grandpa Exaggerating

George Santos squares off against Joe Biden and loses

The MSM is in full throat against Rep. George Santos for Santos’s breathtaking dishonesty about……….well, about just about everything the electorate might care about. The aim here is hardly to purify the public square of mendacity, since if the MSM did that, most of its outlets would be out of business by tomorrow. Instead, the aim is to force Santos to resign from the House, making the Republicans’ precarious majority just that much dicier. All the pearl clutching about prevaricating is merely the usual press-sponsored baloney.

Still, don’t get me wrong. In fact, if Santos had any honor, he would indeed resign. But of course if he had any honor, the reasons for his resignation wouldn’t exist to begin with. Since they do, the question is what should the Republicans do if he refuses to resign. My seat-of-the-pants answer is that they should exclude him from the caucus and not give him any committee assignments. Republicans need all the margin they can get, yes, but this guy is a step too far.

But note what is not getting coverage. (Indeed, listening for what you’re not hearing is, I have found, one of the best ways to discover what the opposition is up to).

Marc Thiessen spells it out in his opinion piece here. I usually avoid quoting other authors at this length (why just repeat what readers can see elsewhere?), but Thiessen’s piece is so thorough and so full of detail that this time it’s worth the candle.

The title is, “Santos must have learned from Biden how to make up details about his past,” and thankfully it leaves little to the imagination.

When it comes to making up self-serving, politically advantageous details about his past, Santos seems to have taken a page from our fabulist in chief. Let’s review the record:

Biden has lied about his family history. During the 1988 Democratic presidential primary, it emerged that he had plagiarized a speech by British Labour leader Neil Kinnock, adopting Kinnock’s family history as his own. “Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?” Biden asked. “Is it because I’m the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree? … My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours?”

Not only were many of the words stolen, so were the facts: Biden was not the first in his family to go to college (only the first on his father’s side), and his ancestors had not been coal miners (though a great-grandfather was a mining engineer). In 2008, he falsely told the United Mine Workers “I am a hard coal miner.” (A spokesperson said he was joking.)

If memory serves, it was Biden’s plagiarism from socialist Kinnock that essentially knocked out his 1988 campaign.

Biden has also made numerous false assertions about his educational achievements. He claimed in 1987 that he had “graduated with three degrees from college,” had received an award as “the outstanding student in the political science department,” finished in the “top half” of his class at law school and received a “full academic scholarship.” None of that was true. He received a single B.A. in history and political science, had only been put up for the award by a professor, graduated 76th in a class of 85 from Syracuse College of Law, and had a partial need-based scholarship. After the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, he claimed to have written “a number of law review articles” on the right to privacy — which was untrue.

No. 76 out of 85 at a middling law school, and lied about it, and now the leader of the Free World. Are we happy yet?

He has also falsely claimed to have been arrested multiple times for taking righteous stands. During his 2020 campaign, Biden repeatedly claimed that he was arrested in South Africa trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison, adding that Mandela thanked him for it when he came to Washington. None of it was true.

Biden also claimed during a speech in Atlanta that he had been arrested while protesting for civil rights: “You think I’m kidding, man. It seems like yesterday the first time I got arrested.” According to the New York Times, “There is no evidence he was ever arrested during a civil-rights protest.” He has also falsely claimed to have been arrested as a college student for entering an all-female dorm, and sneaking into the U.S. Capitol. Has any president experienced so much imagined jail time?

No, but Donald Trump might get some actual jail time courtesy of the administration Joe Biden leads (and, of course, courtesy of Trump’s behavior that opens the door).

He has also lied about his experience in war zones. In 2021, Biden told State Department employees that he was “shot at” overseas — similar to a debunked claim of being shot at inside Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone made during a Democratic presidential debate in 2007. (He later revised the claim, saying that in fact, “I was near where a shot landed.”) In 2019, he told a detailed story about brushing off warnings of danger, when he was vice president, to pin a Silver Star on a Navy captain in Afghanistan.

The Post reported that “almost every detail in the story appears to be incorrect.” It was President Barack Obama, not Biden, who gave him the award; it was the Medal of Honor, not the Silver Star; and the ceremony took place at the White House, not in Afghanistan.

I don’t want to be too harsh here; this particular episode might just be the onset of senility. Whether if it was we can be more confident of Mr. Biden as a leader — or even as just a roughly competent adult — is a different question.

Biden has lied about consoling victims of tragedy. He claimed that he met in Washington with survivors of a school shooting in Parkland, Fla., while he was vice president, even though the shooting took place in 2018, well after he left office, and that he spent time at Tree of Life synagogue, after 11 people were massacred there in 2018, but it turns out he never visited. (He spoke to the rabbi by phone.)

He has lied about his relationships with foreign leaders. In 2020, he claimed that he had gotten China to join the 2016 Paris climate accord “after meeting with Deng Xiaoping,” who died in 1997. And he has claimed more than 20 times that he had traveled 17,000 miles with Chinese President Xi Jinping — earning Biden a “Bottomless Pinocchio” from The Post.

That would be the same Post that is breathless about the prevarications of a freshman Congressman.

And, of course, Biden lies constantly about his record as president. He falsely claimed to have passed his student loan forgiveness “by a vote or two.” (Congress never voted on it.) He has repeatedly falsely claimed that he has cut the federal debt in half; that “real incomes are up” (they’ve suffered the largest decline in four decades); that his Chips Act will create 1 million construction jobs (the real number is 6,200); that his Inflation Reduction Act will reduce inflation (it will not); and that none of his military commanders advised him to leave a residual force in Afghanistan (they did).

Biden’s career has been a constant stream of untruths. Yet no Democratic Party leaders have suggested that Biden is “woefully unqualified” or “unfit to serve.” Maybe Santos should switch parties and run for president — then all would be forgiven.