Even as they attempt to force him out, Democrats are still praising the sterling character of the president, especially in contrast to Trump. But that’s always been a lie.
As corporate media and a growing number Democrats try to force Biden to stand down — an effort that, at the moment, appears to be failing due to the adamant refusal of the Biden family including his wife, Dr. Jill, and son, Hunter, to give up power — the standard refrains heard on MSNBC and CNN debates about the issue always include the requisite tribute to his greatness as a president and his inherent decency and goodness.
We can dismiss the claim that his administration has been a great success, an astonishing disconnect with the reality of an inflation-ridden economy, open border, and a world in chaos on his watch, that is nonetheless ritually repeated regularly on the left-wing news channels. But Democrat partisans actually think they are on firmer ground in affirming that he’s a great guy — and therefore a stark contrast to Trump, whom they denounce as personally evil — even as they come to grips with the fact that he lacks the mental acuity to be the leader of the free world.
But the notion that “Scranton Joe” is a nice guy is as wrongheaded as the claim that he’s mentally competent or a brilliant leader.
A Record of Lies and Slander
The one constant about Biden has been his essential meanness, which, when combined with his well-known predilection for telling tall tales about his own life, is a formula for slander of all those who are not materially contributing to his success.
This even concerns events in his life that were undoubtedly tragic, such as the death of his first wife and a young daughter in a traffic accident in 1972, shortly after his election to the U.S. Senate. For many years, he claimed that the accident that killed his wife and daughter was caused by a drunk driver. But the truth was that those familiar with what happened say Neila Biden was at fault and drove into the path of the tractor/trailer driven by Curtis Dunn, causing the collision.
Biden’s grief at this horrible incident is to be pitied. But that he, a public figure, repeatedly spoke of an innocent private citizen as essentially having murdered two people is despicable. Why did he do it? Did it make it easier to live with to imagine his late wife as a victim? Perhaps. But it’s more likely that it just made for a better story and heightened his own status as a victim. Much as we should all sympathize with the trauma he went through, forcing Dunn to live with the opprobrium brought down upon him by a senator was deeply wrong. In 2008, Dunn’s daughter called on Biden to apologize and said he called to do so. But he never cleared the record on this smear in public.
The same lack of common decency applies to his conduct concerning a fatal accident that was caused by his brother Frank. In 1999, Michael Albano was killed when a Jaguar rented by Frank Biden (and which he was shifting even while someone else was driving), hit him. The youngest of the president’s siblings, an alcoholic, who has profited from the influence-peddling schemes run by brother Jim and nephew Hunter, reportedly told the driver to “punch it,” just before the hit and run occurred, and then told him to flee the scene. Albano’s family successfully sued for $1 million in compensation but has never received a penny.
When Albano’s family begged Joe Biden for help in 2008, all they got was a letter of refusal from the then-senator’s chief of staff. The president has become a wealthy man while spending his entire adult life in public service receiving relatively modest salaries but never lifted a finger to aid a poor family that was harmed by his brother. Is that the behavior of a “nice” man?
Nasty and Mean Politics
The evidence of his meanness in his public life has been just as abundant.
His plagiarism, including stealing the life story of a British politician whose family background made for a better story than his own, provided abundant evidence of his bad character and drove him from the 1988 presidential race. But Biden has continued to lie about that and to repeat false claims about his law school record and other biographical details.
But his meanness has always been an element of his conduct in office.
In 1986, Biden said that Judge Robert Bork was qualified to sit on the Supreme Court and that he would vote for him even if liberal groups complained. But the next year when Bork was nominated by President Ronald Reagan, he didn’t just change his mind. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he presided over and assisted in the smearing of the same man he had praised for his brilliance and helped ensure his defeat. While Ted Kennedy’s infamous “Robert Bork’s America” speech — in which the judge was falsely accused of racism and misogyny, among other crimes — was the keystone of that brutal chapter of dirty politics, it was all enabled and orchestrated by Biden.
Four years later, he played a similar role in the smearing of Clarence Thomas during his Supreme Court confirmation. The unsubstantiated claims of sexual harassment alleged by Anita Hill were only brought forward after the hearings on Thomas’ fitness for office had concluded. But, not losing a chance to harm a black conservative, Biden again enabled attacks on Thomas’ reputation that a more judicious and less partisan chairman would never have allowed.
These were the acts of a ruthless partisan who sacrificed the reputation of the court to make cheap partisan points while harming innocent men. Perhaps that’s what we expect from career politicians. But a nice man? No.
The same applies to the treatment given by Biden and his followers to Tara Reade, the woman who has accused him of sexual misconduct. When it comes to those who accuse other men who are not political allies of Biden, he’s a consistent advocate of the “believe all women” standard. But not with the woman who has consistently maintained that he touched her inappropriately in 1993 and told others about it at the time. We don’t know if Reade is telling the truth about the incident and, other than his well-known offensive habit of touching and sniffing the hair of women in public, Biden has not been accused of similar conduct by anyone else. Reade’s own character has been called into question, including her decision to go live in Russia last year. But it’s fair to say that although her accusation had more substance to it than those of Christine Blasey Ford against Justice Brett Kavanaugh, she was subjected to attacks simply because she claimed the man who was Donald Trump’s opponent had abused her.
Even as he showed us just how unfit he was to be president during the debate with Trump, he also gave the nation more reasons to doubt his good character. Recycling the lie that Trump claimed the neo-Nazis at the 2017 Charlottesville rally were “very fine people” is standard Democrat rhetoric. But a decent politician would have dropped it since even Snopes labeled the claim as “false” only a week before the debate.
Of course, Biden is always happy to repeat lies that hurt Trump or even efforts to discredit honest journalists who reported about Hunter’s misdeeds. The way he repeated the false claim that Hunter’s laptop was “Russian misinformation” at the 2020 debate with Trump showed that the talk of his goodness has no relation to the truth.
Biden’s supporters will answer that Trump is a bad man who has always uttered falsehoods. They have reason to say that. His public philandering was a staple of tabloid coverage for decades before he began his run for the presidency in 2015. Indeed, the reason why many conservatives believed he was unelectable was that it was difficult to imagine anyone who had spent much of his adult life being featured on the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column being elected president. The “Access Hollywood” tape resonated because it seemed in character. The same applies to the claims about him having a tryst with Stormy Daniels, whether or not that is true.
Trump has many good qualities — and among those who know him, there are many who can cite many good deeds, as well as some who will speak of wrongful conduct. But, unlike Biden, Trump has never claimed to be a paragon of virtue. In fact, he has enjoyed his “bad boy” reputation, and a lot of voters love him because he doesn’t dissemble about it.
But whatever one can say about Trump not being an example of a virtuous public figure, Biden’s reputation as a good guy is as unfounded as any assertions of his greatness as a leader.
Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for Newsweek. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.
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