Joe Biden continued his string of public gaffes while campaigning in Iowa Tuesday, inaccurately claiming that Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated in the 1970s.
The former vice president, who has worried even his staunchest allies in recent weeks for often confusing times and places, made the slip-up during a campaign appearance in Urbandale, Iowa.
“Just like in my generation, when I got out of school, when Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King had been assassinated in the ’70s — the late ’70s — I got engaged,” Biden told the audience, before proceeding to ramble about the counter-culture movement of the 1960s.
“Up to that time, remember, none of you women will remember this, but a couple men will remember it,” he said. “That was the time in the early to late ’60s, in the early ’60s, the ’60s, where it was, ‘Drop out, go to Haight-Ashbury, don’t get engaged, don’t trust anyone over 30.’”
Both men were assassinated within mere months of each other in 1968 — a turbulent year in American history. King was killed in April 1968, shortly before delivering a speech in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Kennedy, on the other hand, was assassinated in June 1968, right after having won California’s Democratic presidential primary.
The confusion on Biden’s part is troubling due to the fact that he has often cited both men as big influences on his decision to enter politics. Biden was supposedly so taken with Kennedy, who he once called “the one true hero of my life,” that he plagiarized substantially from his fallen hero during the 1980s.
This is not the first time Biden has been fuzzy about remembering details on the campaign trail. Last week, the 76-year-old former vice president got mixed up while discussing a recent speech he gave attacking President Donald Trump of fanning “the flames of white supremacy.” Instead of accurately stating the speech took place in Burlington, Iowa, Biden claimed it occurred in Burlington, Vermont.
Biden made a similar mistake recently when he referred to Houston and Michigan as the sites of two recent mass shootings that actually occurred in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.
All of those lapses, however, paled in comparison to the one Biden made in Iowa earlier this month. While speaking with reporters about gun control, the former vice president worried many when confused the date of the Parkland school shooting.
“Those kids in Parkland came up to see me when I was vice president,” Biden said, before claiming that when the survivors visited Congress, lawmakers were “basically cowering, not wanting to see them. They did not want to face it on camera.”
The tragic shooting, in question, took place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14, 2018 – more than one year after Biden left the White House.
To help clean up after this string of embarrassments, Politico ran a story Tuesday declaring that concerns about Biden’s health and mental capacity are “overblown.” Author Marc Caputo interviewed Dr. Neal Kassell, the surgeon who operated on the second of Biden’s two brain aneurysms in the late 1980s. “He is every bit as sharp as he was 31 years ago. I haven’t seen any change,” Kassell told the establishment news outlet — just hours before Biden’s latest failure of memory and an outburst at a Fox News reporter who said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is drawing larger crowds than the former Vice President.
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