In the three long years he’s been in the White House, President Joe Biden has routinely treated Americans to fanciful tales about his personal background, his career achievements, and his family history — things the 81-year-old seems actually to believe even when they are demonstrably false.
At this point, it’s unclear if these routine flubs, gaffes, and miscues are evidence of severe cognitive decline, as Special Counsel Robert Hur referenced not long ago, or feed Biden’s well-earned reputation as a liar.
But his latest claim may take the proverbial cake.
Biden suggested to reporters that his late “Uncle Bozy” may have died because cannibals devoured him.
And somehow, that brought to Biden’s mind former President Donald Trump, his GOP challenger for another term in the White House.
“He was in the Army Air Corps before there was an Air Force, before single-engine planes, reconnaissance flights over New Guinea, he volunteered because someone couldn’t make it,” Biden said of his relative, Ambrose “Uncle Bozy” 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, but the government went back when I went down there, and they checked and found parts of the plane and the life,” Biden added.
“And what I was thinking about when I was standing there was when Trump refused to go up to the memorial for veterans in Paris, and he said they were a bunch of suckers and losers.”
Reporting on Biden’s comments, the New York Post noted that Biden made this up.
“The Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency says that Finnegan’s plane actually was lost over the open ocean on May 14, 1944,” the Post reported.
In its official account, the Pentagon declared, “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,” the Defense Department added. “One crew member survived and was rescued by a passing barge. An aerial search the next day found no trace of the missing aircraft or the lost crew members.”
Read: NASA Admits It Was ISS Space Junk That Smashed Into Florida Home Last Month
As for the “suckers” comment, Biden was referring to a report by The Atlantic, a left-wing magazine known for its anti-Trump takes.
The magazine, citing supposed Trump administration officials, claimed Trump said that in 2018 when he was set to visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, where Americans who fought and died in World War I are buried.
John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, said Trump made no such remark. Other White House officials supported that.
The controversy was renewed last October when John Kelly, a retired four-star Marine Corps general who once served as Trump’s chief of staff, confirmed The Atlantic’s story.
Yet, at the time, Trump’s campaign dismissed Kelly as a malcontent.
“John Kelly has totally clowned himself with these debunked stories he’s made up because he didn’t serve his president well while working as chief of Staff,” Steven Cheung, Trump’s campaign spokesperson, told NBC News at the time.
Any views or opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Tampa Free Press.
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