"Thank you, Joe!" chanted thousands of brainwashed attendees slavishly on the first night of the Democratic National Convention. It was what even a New York Times reporter on the scene admitted was gratitude for President Biden leaving the presidential race last month, rather than heartfelt congratulations on a job purportedly well done.
To Democratic leaders, strategists, pollsters, and anyone else who can count, Biden quit his reelection bid because he was irretrievably down in the polls and virtually certain to lose to former president and 2024 Republican Presidential Nominee Donald J. Trump by a margin too wide even for Democratic state election officials to fudge. But until nearly the last minute, Biden and those around him—including his replacement on the ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris—gaslighted the American public with lies, insisting that he was perfectly competent to lead and run.
The lies continued to flow in Biden's garbled and embarrassing valedictory speech late Monday evening, a bum rush organized by the DNC's crooked planners; like cheap mafia hoods hustling a superannuated old time union boss out the back door, they slated Biden's appearance after primetime hours with an "unplanned" delay that did not see the lame duck incumbent take the stage until 11:30 PM on the east coast.
Biden's meandering speech was typical of what he has become. Even with the obvious help of the teleprompter, he barked and yelled, meandered and flubbed. He distorted the convention's irrational and uncertain theme of "joy"—a feeling obviously not shared by thousands of pro-Palestinian protestors chanting "Genocide Joe" and "Killer Kamala"—into the barely contained anger that has been widely reported behind the scenes at the circumstances of his ouster.
For 47 painful minutes, the soon-to-be-former President droned on, with most of his speech boasting of his failed administration's supposed "achievements" and the occasional mendacious jab at Trump. The speech was so full of falsehoods that even pro-Biden/Harris legacy media could not resist fact-checking it in exhaustive articles that quickly popped up on major networks.
Discussing his chaotic three and half years in power, Biden sounded off on environmental and infrastructure projects. These included whoppers like his comical claim to have provided 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations, his boasting about "removing every lead pipe from schools and homes," and his claims that his work on carbon emissions would see their reduction by 50 percent by 2030.
At times, Biden's mendacity veered into economic policy. Evil billionaires, he menaced, are only paying 8.2 percent of their income in taxes, a debunked calculation identified as "way too low" even by PBS and the Left-leaning Brookings Institution, which both place the figure above 20 percent. Biden's 8.2 percent figure, a biased product of his administration's own economists, derives from partial federal income tax calculations rather than the less politically expedient actual figures. It also doesn't register that over 40 percent of American households pay no income tax at all, or the fact that in actual numbers, the top 1 percent pays over 45 percent of all taxes paid in the U.S.
Trade relations, too, fell victim to the addled president's dishonesty when he boasted of job creation in relation to exports. The unavoidable mathematical fact, however, is that the $901 billion trade deficit of 2020 ballooned to over $1 trillion in Biden's first year in office and has never gone below that figure since. "Bidenomics," or "Kamalanomics," as it now being called, has made America poorer, especially in the post-industrial Midwestern swing states that are certain to decide the election in November.
Interspersing these policy lies with personal attacks, Biden trotted out widely debunked falsehoods about his former opponent. No, Trump did not say the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 were "very fine people." As anyone who watched the original video can see, he condemned the racists "totally." Nor is there any proof that Trump called American war dead "losers" and "suckers," an old and unproved charge based on anonymous sources that the Republican candidate vehemently denies.
No, Trump will not do "everything to ban abortion nationwide," as Biden hysterically claimed to enflame an issue important to some women voters, nor does he want to cut Social Security or Medicare.
Trump's position post-Roe v. Wade is that the states should decide the issue. In his campaign, he has repeatedly stated that he will not sign a national abortion ban if reelected, a position that has cost him the support of some pro-life constituents. At Trump's insistence, the GOP's platform, approved at the Republican National Convention last month, dropped language calling for a national abortion ban for the first time since it was originally included in 1984.
Trump's campaign has frequently repeated opposition to cuts in Social Security and Medicare. More recently, he has added that Social Security payments should no longer be taxed.
Finally, Biden insisted that under his leadership "we are unifying the country." With polls showing a dead-even and vituperative race filled with personal attacks on both sides, that might have been the outgoing president's biggest lie of all—and one for which he bears much responsibility.
Paul du Quenoy is President of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute. The views expressed are the author's own and do not constitute any endorsement.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
