Over the years “Geriatric Joe” Biden has become infamous (or rather notorious) for spinning some of the most unbelievable “tall tales” that even Ripley wouldn’t believe so here the Old Colonel has compiled several of his most notable ones in this one tight shot group for your enjoyment. Although all are outright lies and misinformation, many are harmless exaggerations and fabrications to validate his manhood despite his Draft Dodging during Vietnam to avoid any brush with danger but this first lie was hurtful and damaging to the man involved and his family in what was definitely the most traumatic event in either man’s life.
Daughter of man in ’72 Biden crash seeks apology from widowed Senator
·
By CARL HAMILTON
SPECIAL TO THE NEWARK POST
Oct 30, 2008
Newark resident Pamela Hamill wants a public
apology from vice presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), who
she says has repeatedly besmirched her late father, Curtis C. Dunn.
Dunn was the tractor-trailer driver involved
in the December 1972 accident that took the life of the newly-elected U.S.
Senator’s first wife, Neilia, and 13-month-old daughter, Naomi.
Dunn died in 1999, but his daughter says she’s
fed up with Biden publicly mischaracterizing him as having been drunk when the
accident occurred.
According to Delaware Superior Court Judge Jerome O. Herlihy,
who oversaw the police investigation 36 years ago as chief prosecutor, there is
no evidence supporting Biden’s claim.
“The
rumor about alcohol being involved by either party, especially the truck driver
(Dunn), is incorrect,” Herlihy said recently.
Police determined that Biden’s first wife drove into the path of
Dunn’s tractor-trailer, possibly because her head was turned and she didn’t see
the oncoming truck.
Dunn, who overturned his rig while swerving to avoid a
collision, ran to the wrecked car and was the first to render assistance.
Police filed no charges against Dunn, who at that time lived in
North East, Md. with his wife, Ruby, and their seven children.
Biden has been alluding to alcohol being involved in the crash
for nearly a decade. During a speech in 2001, Biden told an audience at
University of Delaware that a drunken driver crashed into his family.
He told a similar story during a public appearance in 2007.
More recently, the vice presidential candidate’s
misrepresentation of Dunn has found its way into major newspapers, including
the New York Times.
It also has been repeated on radio and on television by major
news journalists, including CBS anchorwoman Katie Couric.
Yet Hamill said she had no idea Biden had been misrepresenting
Dunn until late August.
That’s when “Inside Edition” producers requested an interview
with Hamill after the television show’s reporters had gathered evidence
contradicting Biden’s story.
Hamill says she defended Biden at first, believing that,
perhaps, his words had been misconstrued.
But her disbelief turned to anguish when shown a video of Biden
making his unfounded assertion during a public appearance.
Biden
told the crowd, “A tractor-trailer, a guy who allegedly — and I never pursued
it — drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family and
killed my wife instantly and killed my daughter instantly and hospitalized my
two sons …”
“I just burst into tears,” Hamill said. “The story already is
tragic enough, why did he have to sensationalize it by saying my father was
drunk? My family is outraged.”
Hamill appeared on “Inside Edition” on Sept. 18 to set the
record straight and now, acting as family spokesperson, she is campaigning for
Biden to recant his story and restore her father’s honor.
On Oct. 1, after several attempts to make contact, Hamill sent a
registered letter to Biden’s camp, asking him to tell the truth.
She also asked CBS officials to instruct Katie Couric to
broadcast the real circumstances surrounding the fatal accident.
As of Sunday, Hamill hadn’t heard from Biden’s camp.
In an Oct. 21 e-mail, a CBS spokesman acknowledged discrepancies
in Biden’s story and explained that he’s awaiting word from the “news people.”
Hamill said learning about Biden’s false portrayal of her late
father has chilled warm feelings that she once held for the senator.
In 2001, she wrote a heartfelt letter to Biden expressing her
father’s profound grief after hearing Biden make a post Sept. 11 speech in
which he told the audience that, given his history, he could empathize with
victims.
“Growing up, my dad never talked about it. He always got very
solemn around Christmastime because the anniversary was Dec. 18, and he never
wanted to celebrate the holidays,” Hamill said. “When newspapers had
anniversary articles (about the crash), we hid them from dad.”
Biden responded in a handwritten note, which, in part, reads,
“All that I can say is I am sorry for all of us and please know that neither I
or my sons feel any animosity whatsoever.”
Hamill says that because she fondly recalled those tender
correspondences, the revelation of Biden’s distorted story is even more
overwhelming.
“We always felt like our heartstrings were attached to (Biden’s)
heartstrings. Now we feel stabbed in the back,” she said.
Hamill wants to clear her late father’s name before Biden’s
story is even more widely accepted as fact.
“Suppose he becomes the next vice president,” she said. “Movies
could be made about him and books could be written about him, all falsely
portraying my father as a drunk driver. We need to set the record straight and
clear my father’s name right now before this goes any further.”
… and here is the rest of the story:
In late August of 2008, during the
presidential campaign in which Biden was now Barack Obama’s running mate,
Inside Edition aired a clip of him talking about the “errant driver who stopped
to drink.” The daughter of Curtis C. Dunn, that driver who died in 1999, was
distraught. “The family feels these statements are both hurtful and untrue and
we didn’t know where they originated from” the daughter, Pamela Hamill, told a
reporter from the News Journal in Delaware, “he was a good, hardworking man,
and wonderful father.” Her father had mourned the accident, she said, and
always was solemn around the holidays because of it.
After CBS News rehashed the
debunking in 2009, Biden finally called her. “He apologized for hurting my
family in any way,” she said. “So we accepted that—and kind of end of story
from there.”
This was very gracious of the Dunn family given Biden had been telling a similar
false account of the accident to crowds for years. He would say: “Let me tell
you a little story … A tractor-trailer, a guy
who allegedly — and I never pursued it — drank his lunch instead of eating his
lunch, broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly and killed my daughter
instantly and hospitalized my two sons …”
He would say this even though he knew it wasn’t true.
The driver of the truck, Curtis C.
Dunn of Pennsylvania, was not charged with drunk driving. He wasn’t charged
with anything. The accident was an accident, and though the police file no
longer exists, coverage in the newspapers at the time made it clear that fault
was not in question. For whatever reason, Neilia Biden, who was holding the
baby, ended up in the right of way of Dunn’s truck coming down a long hill.
According to Jerome Herlihy, a
retired judge who then was a deputy attorney general and a Biden neighbor who
still remains friends with him: “She had a stop sign. The truck driver did not.”
Herlihy was asked “to go out to the state police troop where the driver of the
other vehicle was to make sure everything was going all right,” so he did. “In
the end,” Herlihy said, “I concurred in their decision that there was no fault
on his part.”
Biden loves to retell
certain stories. Some aren’t credible.
Analysis by Glenn Kessler The Fact Checker, 31 August 2023 at 1530 EDT
Edited Article Text:
“President Biden, like many politicians,
likes to tell stories …. But throughout his career — most famously in his
first presidential campaign, in the 1988 election cycle — Biden’s propensity to exaggerate or
embellish tales about his life led to doubts about his truthfulness….
The tale of the fire in his house
At least six times as president, mostly recently in
comments to Hurricane Idalia victims Wednesday, Biden has exaggerated the
extent of a fire that occurred at his house in 2004.
“And I know, having had a house burn down with
my wife in it — she got out safely, God willing — that having a significant
portion of it burn, I can tell: 10 minutes makes a hell of a difference,” Biden
said at an infrastructure
event in November 2021.
In March this year, speaking to a
firefighters conference,
Biden said: “Lightning struck in a pond behind my house, went up underneath the
conduit, and caught the — caught fire underneath the floorboards of my house.
And it was during the summer. Air conditioning was on. Smoke that thick all
three stories.” He added: “My fire company was there to go in and save my wife,
get her out; the cat; and my ’67 Corvette.”
Speaking to a summit on fire
prevention last October,
Biden said: “We almost lost a couple firefighters, they tell me, because the
kitchen floor was — the — burning between beams in the house, in addition to
almost collapsed into the basement.”
The contemporary news accounts in the Wilmington News
Journal and the Associated Press are much less dramatic.
“Biden’s house on Barley Mill Road was reported
hit by lightning at 8:16 a.m., emergency officials said,” the News Journal
reported. “There were no injuries and firefighters kept the fire contained to
one room.” The article added that “firefighters from Cranston Heights,
Talleyville, Elsmere, Mill Creek and Hockessin fire companies arrived to find
heavy smoke coming from the house.”
Cranston Heights Fire Co. Chief George Lamborn told the newspaper the flames did not spread from the kitchen. “Luckily, we got it pretty early,” he said. “The fire was under control in 20 minutes.”
The tale of the Amtrak conductor
At least 10 times as president, most recently
during an Aug. 15 speech in Milwaukee, Biden has told a
heartwarming but implausible story about an Amtrak conductor named
Angelo Negri who congratulated him for traveling more on Amtrak than he had on
Air Force planes as vice president. Biden often brings up the anecdote when
discussing infrastructure projects or speaking to labor groups.
Biden’s
tale varies slightly in each retelling. In one version, told at a New Jersey Transit facility in October 2021, Biden
recalled: “Ang walks up to me and goes, ‘Joey, baby!’ Grabs my cheek. And I
thought the Secret Service was going to blow his head off.” Biden said that
Negri had read Biden had flown 1.2 million miles as vice president, but Negri
calculated he actually had traveled more than 2 million miles on Amtrak. “So,
Joey, I don’t want to hear this about the Air Force anymore,” Negri allegedly
said.
Often Biden adds: “True story.”
But it’s not possible this conversation took
place as Biden describes. Negri and Biden were friends, according to a CNN
interview with Negri’s
stepdaughter in 2021, and she said Negri “adored” Biden. But Biden did not pass the
1.2 million-mile mark until 2016; Negri retired from Amtrak in 1993, 16 years before
Biden became vice president. Negri died in 2014, two years before Biden claims they had this
conversation.
In 2009, after Biden became vice president,
Esquire described a “Heeeey, Joey baby!”
conversation with an unnamed conductor, suggesting Biden may be mixing up Negri
with another person.
The tale of the gay men in suits kissing
Three times this year — and at least seven times
since 2014 — Biden has told a version, most recently on Aug. 10, of a story
about words his father supposedly spoke after a teenage Biden saw
two well-dressed men in suits kiss each other in downtown Wilmington in the
early 1960s.
“Joey, it’s simple. They love each other,”
Biden’s father is said to have remarked.
Biden usually mentions this story when
discussing gay issues but there are reasons to be
skeptical. Biden depicts a scene
that would have been unusual six decades ago. He describes this
exchange with his father usually as taking place in 1961. But back then, gay
men generally did not kiss in public. Many people regarded homosexuality as
deviant. Delaware’s Rehoboth Beach had some bars regarded then as gay-friendly, but that’s not the same as the strait-laced
business community in downtown Wilmington.
Moreover, Biden’s story has evolved over
time. In 2014, in a New York Times article on his evolution on same-sex marriage, he
was the father in the story, speaking to one of his sons. In the article,
Biden’s father figures in a different story on a similar theme — forcing a
friend to apologize after insulting a gay couple at a Delaware beach. But in
1987, Biden told the Los Angeles
Times yet another
version — that his father had lectured him after he tried to put off a visit to
a gay couple who were strong supporters of the senator and shared an apartment
at a Delaware beach.
The tale of his civil rights arrests
Biden had a tangential role in the civil rights
movement — The Fact Checker determined that he participated in one walkout at a
restaurant and picketed a segregated movie theater — and yet sometimes he has
suggested he was arrested for advocating on behalf of Black people.
Four times, including once as
president, Biden has suggested he
was arrested for standing on the porch with a Black couple who were subject to
demonstrations. Sometimes he says that his mother warned him not to go to the
protests. “Remember when I told you not to go down there, Honey, because
everybody is protesting and you got arrested standing with the family on the
porch,” he said his mother told him, in a version he recounted in 2017. (Twice
Biden said the police merely brought him back home from the protest after he
stood on the porch.)
But when we investigated, the story did not add up. There was a protest
of a Black couple who had purchased a house in an all-White area, but it was a
neighborhood many miles from the Biden home. Biden instead appears to be
referring to a protest that took place outside the home of the real estate
agent who was involved in the sale. That was near where he lived as a teenager
at the time.
Campaigning for president in 2020, Biden three
times claimed he was arrested in South Africa for trying to see Nelson Mandela,
who at the time was imprisoned on Robben Island, near Cape Town. When we determined that was
false, he amended his
statement to say he was “stopped” at the airport while traveling with a
congressional delegation — though others on the delegation said that did not
happen.
As president, Biden usually just comments that
he tried to see Mandela while visiting South Africa. But once he said he almost was
arrested. “Only time I almost got arrested was I was trying to go see Nelson
Mandela in South Africa and when I was at a civil rights march,” he said
at a Democratic National
Committee event in September 2022. “That was the only two times. But I didn’t get arrested. They
didn’t think I was worth it.”
The tales of a heroic uncle and the family
hospital
Besides his father, Biden’s grandfather, uncle
and other family members appear as regular characters in his speeches. But some
of the stories he tells are not plausible.
Speaking to veterans
in December, Biden recalled how his
Uncle Frank fought in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II and was
awarded the Purple Heart but never received it. He said that after he became
vice president in 2009, he arranged to present the medal to his uncle with the
rest of the family in attendance. But his uncle, Frank H. Biden, died in 1999,
a decade before Biden became vice president. His Official Military Records as
does neither his obituary nor
tombstone mentions a Purple
Heart, awarded when a soldier is killed or wounded while serving….
Twice this year, most recently in the Milwaukee
speech, Biden has claimed his grandfather, an oil company executive, “died in
the same hospital” just before Biden himself was born there. (In
April it was two weeks before, in August it was six days.)
But Biden’s paternal grandfather, Joseph H.
Biden, died at Johns Hopkins Hospital on Sept. 26, 1941, according to an
obituary. Biden was born at St. Mary’s Hospital in Scranton, Pa., on Nov. 20, 1942, 14 months later. His
maternal grandfather, Ambrose Finnegan, did die at St. Mary’s — but in 1957,
nearly 15 years later.”
Academic Prowess
"Geriatric Joe" Biden claimed that he
had attended law school at Syracuse University on a full academic scholarship
and finished in the top half of his law school class, that he had been named
the outstanding student in the political science department as an undergraduate
at the University of Delaware, and that he had graduated from Delaware with
three undergraduate degrees.
In fact, he did NOT have a full academic
scholarship, he ranked 76th in his class of 85 and failed a course when he
plagiarized a law review article for a paper he wrote, he was NEVER named
“outstanding” for anything in college or law school and he graduated from
Delaware with just one degree.
More Biden Whoppers
It’s another day and another fish tale from Joe Biden.
This time, the president falsely claimed in a speech to have personally witnessed the Pittsburgh
bridge collapse last January.
He spun his yarn trying to impress his
audience; however, he was caught flat-footed by critics.
“A lot of you were with me when I was in
Pittsburgh,” Biden told a crowd gathered at a Milwaukee wind turbine
manufacturing plant to hear him speak. “By the way, Pittsburgh is a city of
bridges – more bridges in Pittsburgh than any other city in America.”
He went on to claim, “I watched that bridge collapse,” adding, “I got there and saw it collapse
with over 200 feet off the ground going over a valley. It collapsed. Thank God
school was out during the pandemic.”
The 477-foot-long bridge collapsed hours before his speech. The president was not anywhere
near the site.
Some on X, formerly known as Twitter,
suggested that Biden had lost touch with reality.
“Joe Biden watched a bridge collapse in
Pittsburgh. He’s not lying. Lying requires understanding reality and saying
something contrary. Sadly, our president lacks a grasp on reality. His head
believes he saw it collapse,” one user wrote.
Others accused the president of being an
unabashed liar.
Another post opined, “Prolific liar or dementia? Joe Biden tells
a lie each day. Today: Biden claims
he witnessed a Pittsburgh bridge collapse.”
Joe Biden Tall Tale Not Isolated Incident – At the Pittsburgh
Tree of Life Synagogue – or maybe NOT and Just in His Mind!
Joe Biden has a long history of tall tales. Although he hasn’t talked about his rides
with Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill, he has come close.
In 2021, Biden was corrected by the executive director of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue for
claiming he had visited it.
The synagogue was the site of the horrific
2018 massacre of 11 people by a Neo-Nazi.
“I used to think that hate could be defeated,
it could be wiped out. But I learned a long time ago, it can’t. It only hides.
It hides. It hides under the rocks. And given any oxygen at all, it comes out.
It’s a minority view, but it comes out, and it comes out raging. And it’s been
given too much oxygen in the last four, five, seven, 10 years, and it has seen itself,
whether it was – I remember spending time at the – you know, going to the – you
know, the Tree of Life Synagogue, speaking with the – just –,” Biden said; he didn’t finish the sentence, instead
continuing, “It just is amazing these things are happening – happening in
America.”
Tree of Life Executive Director Barb
Feige told The
New York Post that Biden had never been to the synagogue even before he became
president.
Biden’s ‘CornPop’ Tale
Biden’s most infamous Pecos Bill tale probably
was his claim in 2019 to have confronted a black gang leader in Wilmington,
Delaware in 1962 while he was a lifeguard.
“CornPop was a bad dude and he ran a bunch of
bad boys,” he said while
mimicking a black American accent. “I walked out with the chain. I walked up to
my car,” Biden said. “I said: ‘First of all … when I tell you to get off the
board, you get off the board, and I’ll kick you out again. But I shouldn’t have
called you Esther Williams, I apologize.’”
“But I don’t know if that apology is going to
work … “He said OK, closed the straight razor and my heart began to beat
again.”
His tale immediately raised skepticism and
many in the media refused to accept it as anything other than a fabrication.
Biden has always had a knack for making things
up. It’s not a senior thing.
He has been known as a liar as far as 1987.He was forced out of the 1988 presidential campaign because he lied about his law school education and plagiarized Labour leader Neil Kinnock.
A few more Biden whoppers he told during a Pennsylvania campaign swing 17-19 April 2024
Biden’s uncle in World War II
In
Scranton, where Biden was born, he told a dramatic World War II story about his uncle Ambrose
Finnegan: “He got shot down in an area where there
were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time. They never recovered
his body.” He blamed cannibalism even more directly in his later Pittsburgh
speech claiming Finnegan “got shot
down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be —
there were a lot of cannibals, for real,
in that part of New Guinea.”
Facts First: Biden’s claim differs from the account provided by the Defense Department. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s page on Finnegan says this about the 1944 incident: “For unknown reasons, this plane was forced to ditch in the ocean off the north coast of New Guinea. Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard. Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash.” This official account, which notes that an additional crew member survived the crash, makes no mention of the plane being shot down or of possible cannibalism; while Biden said the crash happened “in” New Guinea, where there was indeed some cannibalism at the time, the official account notes the men went down in the ocean.
Biden’s earnings
Biden
repeated his regular promise that nobody making less than $400,000 per year
will pay even a cent more in taxes under his proposals. He then added, “I hope you’re all able to make $400,000. I never
did.”
Facts First: Biden’s “I never did” claim is false. In fact, his presidential salary is $400,000 per year; the joint tax filings of President Biden and first lady Jill Biden showed $619,976 in income last year, $579,514 in 2022 and $610,702 in 2021. In addition, Biden earned millions in 2017 and 2018, when, during his time as a private citizen following his vice presidency, he and Jill Biden signed a lucrative book deal and he delivered paid speeches. The Bidens made $15.6 million in the two years after leaving office The Bidens’ joint tax filings showed a total of about $11 million in 2017 income and about $4.6 million in 2018 income.
Biden’s visits to Iraq and Afghanistan
Biden
claimed in “I was in, I think, 36, 38
times in Iraq and Afghanistan as a senator and as a vice president.”
Facts First: These figures are false, according to statistics previously released by Biden’s own 2020 presidential campaign. The campaign said in 2019 that Biden had visited Iraq and Afghanistan on a total of 21 occasions, the Washington Post reported at the time. Biden has delivered similar falsehoods about his travel to Iraq and Afghanistan on various previous occasions — including in the 2019 remarks that prompted his campaign to correct the record.
For a Ton of “historical” Biden gaffs, see my 2010 Blog article:
Joe Biden - The Consummate Gaff-mister and Some of My Favorite
“Biden-isms”
https://old-soldier-colonel.blogspot.com/2010/10/who-had-worst-week-in-washington-vice.html
