President Joe Biden is so notorious for making up wild stories about his history and that of his family that there should be teams of reporters and fact-checkers on standby to document and catalog every instance for the public record.
But unlike how they do with Republicans like former President Donald Trump, the same people who virtue signaled endlessly during the Trump years about how “Democracy dies in darkness” have little to no interest whatsoever in holding powerful Democrats accountable for the things they say.
This is something that was confirmed in so many words by the Washington Post in January 2021, when they told the Daily Caller that unlike the database they compiled for Trump, “we do not have plans to launch a Biden database at this time, [though] we will continue to dig into the accuracy of statements by political figures of all party affiliations.”
We learned it from CNN’s Daniel Dale, too, thanks to tweets like this during the course of Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign:
With all of that in mind, we turn to the latest apparent whopper that Joe Biden told about his family history, this one in front of a group of Delaware veterans on Friday during a speech he gave on the passage of the PACT Act, which according to the VA’s website is “a new law that expands VA health care and benefits for Veterans exposed to burn pits, Agent Orange, and other toxic substances.”
In his remarks, Biden told the story of his Uncle Frank, who he said won the Purple Heart after fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. According to Biden, his father Joe Biden, Sr. asked him after he was elected Vice President in 2008 to present it to his uncle because “he never got it.” President Biden went on to say that when he did supposedly try to present it to his Uncle Frank that he didn’t want it:
You know, I — my dad, when I got elected Vice President, he said, “Joey, Uncle Frank fought in the Battle of the Bulge.” He was not feeling very well now — not because of the Battle of the Bulge. But he said, “And he won the Purple Heart. And he never received it. He never — he never got it. Do you think you could help him get it? We’ll surprise him.”So [I] got him the Purple Heart. He had won it in the Battle of the Bulge. And I remember he came over to the house, and I came out, and he said, “Present it to him, okay?” We had the family there.I said, “Uncle Frank, you won this. And I want to…” He said, “I don’t want the damn thing.” [Laughter] No, I’m serious. He said, “I don’t want it.” I said, “What’s the matter, Uncle Frank? You earned it.” He said, “Yeah, but the others died. The others died. I lived. I don’t want it.”
Watch:
The big problem with this story, as noted by Forbes.com, is that Biden’s uncle and his father both died several years before Biden became Barack Obama’s VP:
President Joe Biden appeared to make a major gaffe Friday when he claimed that after being elected vice president in 2008, he awarded his uncle, Frank Biden, a Purple Heart for his service in World War II, but there are some major holes in his story–primarily the fact his uncle died almost a decade before the 2008 election.[…]The president’s father died in 2002; his uncle died in 1999.[…]There doesn’t appear to be any record of Biden giving his uncle the honor—the president hasn’t mentioned the story in the past, there have been no news articles written about it and Frank Biden’s name does not appear on a list of recipients held by the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor, though the list is incomplete.
As of this writing, neither Dale nor WaPo fact-checker Glenn Kessler has written a thing about this tall tale, not on their Twitter pages nor their respective “news” websites. Nothing yet from the Democrat apologists at Politifact or FactCheck.org, either.
Even if any of them do get around to it, expect it to look something like WaPo’s fawning coverage of another military-related lie Biden told in 2019:
Interestingly enough, that false story was simply another version of the one he told Friday:
As for Biden’s penchant for making up stuff as he goes along, Professor Jacobson sums things up accordingly:
Yep, especially when those in Fact Check World often look the other way when these things happen, or just boil it down to “Joe being Joe.”
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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