During his acceptance speech this week, Joe Biden said, “Character is on the ballot.”
Okay, fine. Let’s talk about how Joe Biden’s proven history of lying and plagiarizing reflect on his character.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Biden regularly claimed to have been an activist in the civil rights movement. In 1983, he said, “When I was 17 years old, I participated in sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie houses in my state, and my stomach turned upon hearing the voices of Faubus and Barnett, and my soul raged upon seeing the dogs of Bull Connor.”
In 1988, he admitted that the extent of his civil rights participation was working at an all-black swimming pool for a summer while he was in college. “But I was not out marching. I was not down in Selma. I was not anywhere else. I was a suburbanite kid who got a dose of exposure to what was happening to black Americans.”
During the 2020 Democratic primary, he repeated the lie that he was involved in civil rights activism.
He also once claimed, “I organized a civil rights boycott because they wouldn’t serve black kids. One of our football players was black and we went there and they said they wouldn’t serve him. And I said to the others, ‘Hey, we can’t go in there.’ So we all left.”
But in 1987, the black football player said his team mates “weren’t aware of what happened. … I was only 16 then. It was my problem and my battle for me to work out. They were oblivious to it until later.”
In 1988, Biden referred to “my ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania.” The line was part of the Neil Kinnock speech he plagiarized.
In 2004, he acknowledged that he did not have family members who worked in mining. But then in 2008, he told the United Mine Workers that he himself had once been a coal miner.
In 2007, Biden claimed he was “shot at” during the Iraq War while visiting the Green Zone, the heavily guarded area in the middle of Baghdad where the United States embassy is based.
When asked for details about the shooting, a Biden campaign aide told the Hill that the then-senator was staying at a hotel in the Green Zone when a mortar landed several hundred yards away.
