{"id":1314374,"date":"2019-09-07T19:08:01","date_gmt":"2019-09-08T01:08:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/polman-column-has-trump-lowered-the-bar-for-bidens-serial-gaffes\/"},"modified":"2019-09-07T19:08:01","modified_gmt":"2019-09-08T01:08:01","slug":"polman-column-has-trump-lowered-the-bar-for-bidens-serial-gaffes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/polman-column-has-trump-lowered-the-bar-for-bidens-serial-gaffes\/","title":{"rendered":"Polman column: Has Trump lowered the bar for Biden\u2019s serial gaffes?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Dick Polman<\/strong>
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Joe Biden has long been adept at talking with a foot in his mouth, so perhaps it\u2019s no surprise lately he has overdosed on whoppers. Nevertheless, it has unnerved many Democrats to hear their 2020 front-runner oscillate so frequently between fact and fiction.<\/p>\n

Which prompts me to wonder: Is a serial gaffer the best possible candidate to challenge a serial liar? Or is Donald Trump so uniquely horrific \u2014 Peter Wehner, a former aide to three Republican presidents, calls him \u201cpathologically dishonest\u201d \u2014 that he has basically lowered the bar for Biden?<\/p>\n

Biden has been on a tear, and not in a particularly good way. In August, he said that Bobby Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King had been assassinated in \u201cthe late 1970s.\u201d Actually, they were assassinated in 1968. He lamented the recent mass shootings in \u201cHouston\u201d and \u201cMichigan\u201d \u2014 which took place in El Paso and Dayton. He said that he met with students of the Parkland shootings while he was vice president, but the shootings took place in 2018, long after Trump was elected. A few weeks ago, he thought he was in Vermont, when in fact he was standing in the critical early-primary state of New Hampshire.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re perhaps tempted to chalk those up to the aging process (he\u2019s 76), but in 2008, when he was 11 years younger, he offered this Great Depression history lesson: \u201cWhen the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television.\u201d Um. When the market crashed in 1929, Herbert Hoover was president. Roosevelt didn\u2019t become president until 1933, and he never went on television. He was dead during the rise of television.<\/p>\n

But Biden\u2019s piece de resistance (thus far) happened on Aug. 21, in a New Hampshire meeting hall, when he recalled how he had journeyed to Afghanistan and pinned a medal on a Navy captain who had rappelled down a ravine to fetch the body of comrade killed in combat. The Navy captain had risen back up the ravine, carrying the body on his back. The captain said he didn\u2019t deserve the medal, telling Biden: \u201cDo not pin it on me, sir!\u201d Recalling this story, Biden told his New Hampshire audience: \u201cThis is the God\u2019s honest truth. My word as a Biden.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, some fact-checking reporters at the Washington Post scrutinized Biden\u2019s \u201cGod\u2019s honest truth,\u201d and found that \u201calmost every detail in the story appears to be incorrect. \u2026 In the space of three minutes, Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.\u201d<\/p>\n

Biden has long told variations of this story to a number of audiences. Sometimes it\u2019s a Navy captain (according to military records, that character is fictitious), sometimes it\u2019s an Army captain (according to military records, ditto), and sometimes the heroic action took place in Iraq, not Afghanistan. Sometimes the dead soldier was pulled from a ravine, sometimes from a Humvee.<\/p>\n

The truth (which should be enough) is that, in 2011, Biden did pin a medal on an Army staff sergeant who\u2019d tried without success to rescue a dead comrade from a burning vehicle in Afghanistan \u2014 and who had indeed told Biden that he didn\u2019t deserve the medal. And yet, after The Washington Post parsed his erroneous story-telling, he didn\u2019t seem to understand the problem: \u201cI was making the point how courageous these people are. \u2026 What is it that I said wrong?\u201d<\/p>\n

Hence the conundrum for Democrats: Has Trump \u2014 with his documented 12,000 lies \u2014 lowered the bar so that Biden\u2019s falsehoods should be deemed no big deal? That Biden should get a pass because his fictional forays are far more benign?<\/p>\n

Biden himself has insisted that he should get a pass, saying last December,\u201dI am a gaffe machine, but my God, what a wonderful thing compared to a guy who can\u2019t tell the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some Democratic primary voters in South Carolina, interviewed recently, don\u2019t care a whit. One woman said Biden\u2019s flubs were fine because \u201chis heart is in the right place, and that\u2019s what we need right now.\u201d One guy, asked about Biden\u2019s errors, said, \u201cSo what? I do too. He\u2019s human. It makes him real.\u201d Another woman said, \u201cThat\u2019s what makes him likable.\u201d Another guy said, \u201cThe gaffes don\u2019t matter because we all mess up, we\u2019re all human.\u201d<\/p>\n

If voters like a politician, they\u2019ll give that person plenty of slack. Trump\u2019s cultists prove the point in the extreme, but it\u2019s not a new phenomenon. After all, voters elected Ronald Reagan twice despite his frequent flights of imagination.<\/p>\n

Context is everything. If Biden can convince enough people that he\u2019s a comfortable soft landing after four dire years of Trump turbulence, his blarney won\u2019t be a deal-breaker.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2019 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman is the national political columnist at WHYY in Philadelphia and a \u201cWriter in Residence\u201d at the University of Pennsylvania. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dick Polman Joe Biden has long been adept at talking with a foot in his mouth, so perhaps it\u2019s no surprise lately he has overdosed on whoppers. Nevertheless, it has unnerved many Democrats to hear their 2020 front-runner oscillate so frequently between fact and fiction. Which prompts me to wonder: Is a serial gaffer the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1314374","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-27 02:55:31","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1314374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1314374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1314374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1314374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}