RUTHFULLY YOURS

Joe Biden is a proud retail politician, a man who believes the personal touch is how elected officials cement a connection with us. So I’ll share my personal story about how he cemented a connection with me, back when I and a few hundred thousand other troops were preparing for war, and Joe wafted in to warn us we were all to get our collective ass kicked.

In January of 1991, I was a second lieutenant in the 178th Personnel Service Company, an administrative appendix to the buffed body of the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment. My troops and I had landed in the Gulf town of Dhahran a week before Christmas and gradually made our way inland by long, grim, nearly silent convoys — creeping, 20-mph slogs across the one two-lane highway, then off the road and across the sands to set up camp.

In mid January, after maybe twelve hours of deliberate, dusty driving, I climbed out of a deuce-and-a-half and stretched my limbs as the soldiers began unloading, somewhere beneath the triangle where Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia meet. A radio was playing in someone’s truck. Radio options were limited in this landscape; occasionally you could find the signal for the Armed Forces Network, if there was a large enough base nearby, but sometimes you couldn’t. AFN, Stars and Stripes, and occasional copies of a surprisingly good English-language broadsheet called “Arab News” were our sole media diet apart from whatever magazines we subscribed to, which would arrive weeks late in the mail. All three of our main sources were, of course, pro-U.S., which was fine by me. I had no idea what we were in for. I wanted only the most optimistic spin on things.

Which is why it was so startling to hear an American voice raining hellfire warnings on us over the radio. At first I assumed I was hearing AFN, but AFN didn’t let speeches go on like this uninterrupted, except maybe presidential addresses, and was strongly averse to downbeat messages. It dawned on me that we were listening to a mischievous enemy radio station that was blasting out unnerving propaganda to sap our morale like Tokyo Rose. Except the speaker hitting Saddam’s talking points was not a foreigner. It was Senator Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. Tokyo Joe.

“What vital interest of the United States of America justifies sending young Americans to their death in the sands of the Arabian peninsula?” Biden asked, in his speech announcing his vote against the war resolution on January 12, 1991. “The appeasers of the past are now ready to vote to spill my son’s blood and his generation’s blood to satisfy and salve their consciences,” he declared. (I don’t know why he specified his son, as neither of his boys was in the military at the time; Beau eventually signed on, but that was twelve years later.) Biden gravely informed us that we did not enjoy America’s backing: “President Bush, . . . I implore you to understand that even if you win today, 46 to 54, you still lose. The Senate and the nation are divided on the issue. You have no mandate for war, Mr. President. . . . The impatience you feel, the anger you feel are all justified, but none of them add up to vital interest and none of them — none of them — justify the death of our sons and daughters.”

He called the proposed attack “dangerous folly.” He predicted it “could cost tens or hundreds of thousands of lives,” meaning U.S. ones. He predicted “loss of American international support in the future.” He asked, “Who do we think we are? What do we think of our capabilities to do what has seldom been done in history without total occupation of the entire region?”

War, you may have heard, can be a bit stressful under the best of circumstances. It’s a real downer when your own leaders stand up and call you chumps who are going to get mown down by the thousands. Advice for politicians: Make whatever case you feel is morally correct, but try not to go so far that you wind up starring in enemy propaganda.

The ground war turned out okay, and was over in 100 hours with a KIA total of about 140. I’m sure Biden was happy to be proven wrong, though if he ever said so, I missed it. Most would argue he was wrong again when he voted for the 2003 Iraq War, although in that case even as he voted yes he repeatedly warned about its consequences. If the invasion turned out to be a success he could claim he supported it, but if it went pear-shaped he could say, “I told you so.” He went on to vote against the 2007 surge that restored order after years of chaos, then put a cherry on top of it all when he advised President Obama not to carry out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden (“Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go”). Then he put a cherry on top of the cherry when he lied about this: When asked, on January 3 of this year, “Didn’t you tell President Obama ‘Don’t go’ after bin Laden that day?” Biden replied, “No, I didn’t. I didn’t.” “Three Pinocchios,” declared the Washington Post. Biden wanted to wait for more information, which is something a senator from the great state of Blowhardia can always say but a commander in chief cannot. Sometimes you actually do have to put down the microphone and pick up the sword. Opportunities to kill the world’s most wanted men don’t come around very often. Nine years later, when Iran’s top military commander and strategist, Qasem Soleimani, was arguably the world’s chief baddie, Biden was against targeting him, too. After President Trump smoked him, Biden called this action “tossing a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox” and suggested it would touch off a major war in the Mideast. As a commander in chief, Joe Biden would make Jimmy Carter look like Winston Churchill.

Biden has managed to be so consistently wrong about virtually everything that even the stuff he is right about he is also wrong about, at one time or another, notably the Hyde amendment, which was his sole remaining tie to the claim of being an abortion moderate. For 40 years, Biden backed Hyde, which barred federal funding for abortions. He reiterated this stance on June 5, 2019. When other Democrats reacted negatively, he reversed himself the very next day. All principles are disposable depending on where the party leads him, and these days it is venturing very far left of the Obama administration. Says a swooning admirer, New York Times editorial-board member Mara Gay, “Biden’s platform is far more liberal than Barack Obama’s was years ago. . . . We were kind of blown away about how much more similar it is to Bernie Sanders’s platform in some ways than Barack Obama in 2008.”

Perhaps the most noteworthy piece of legislation Biden ever wrote, the 1994 crime bill he drafted in the Senate, came when the party was eager to look tough on crime. Biden later told the National Association of Police Officers, “You guys sat at that conference table of mine for a six-month period, and you wrote the bill.” Today, however, Democrats worry that being tough on crime can mean locking up a lot of black men who commit crimes, so Biden’s new line is to say he was opposed to all of the stuff in his bill that’s now radioactive with the Left: mandatory minimum sentencing, a three-strikes-and-you’re-out provision, federal bucks for state prisons. “I didn’t support more money to build state prisons,” he claimed in July of 2019. “I was against it. We should be building rehab centers and not prisons.” (His campaign clarified that Biden supported only $6 billion of federal money for the state prisons, not the $10 billion that was in the final bill — the bill he voted for and bragged about for many years.) When your media arm is also known as “the media,” you can get away with saying you’re against the laws you wrote.

Like Donald Trump, Biden missed the Vietnam War, obtaining five student draft deferments and later being disqualified on account of childhood asthma that apparently did not limit him in any other way; he never mentions having the condition in his memoir, Promises to Keep, in which he boasts of his high-school and college football career and his work as a lifeguard. Just two years out of law school, he began his political career, at 27, winning a seat on the New Castle County Council, and he has been slapping backs and sniffing hair ever since. The year 2020 brings us Biden’s desperate, last-chance play for the presidency, which he first sought more than 30 years ago — in that 1988 campaign that exploded in a five-way freeway pileup of simultaneous plagiarism scandals during which we all learned that Biden had stolen material for a 15-page law-school paper, then borrowed without attribution from speeches by Hubert Humphrey, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and, notoriously, British Labour firebrand Neil Kinnock. Like a jewel thief who knocks over Grandma on his way out of the store, Biden lied at the same time he stole: Unlike Kinnock, the son of a Welsh coal miner, Biden could not claim he was the first one in his family “in a thousand generations” to go to college. Biden was so invested in lifting from Kinnock that he even claimed to be descended from coal miners, which perhaps sounds more romantic than the truth, which is that his dad was a used-car salesman and that he attended a private school that today costs $28,000 a year.

Dizzyingly enough, even the official story of how Biden met his ladylove is a lie, according to someone who really ought to know. Jill Stevenson first met Biden when she and her husband Bill worked on the pol’s first Senate campaign in 1972, the latter recently said. Biden’s first wife, Neilia, died later that year, and Bill Stevenson began to notice in 1974 that Jill kept making excuses to spend time with Biden or babysit his two young sons. Jill even turned down an offer to go meet the young Bruce Springsteen before his performance at a club, saying she preferred to stay with Biden’s children that night. Jill later got in a fender bender, and Stevenson said he learned to his amazement that Biden was the one driving his wife’s car. That seemed to settle things. The official story is that Biden’s brother Frank set him up with Jill on a blind date in 1975, after her marriage had dissolved but a few weeks before it finally ended in divorce. The Biden campaign has not refuted Stevenson’s claims. Jill’s first husband has said, “I genuinely don’t want to harm Jill’s chances of becoming first lady. She would make an excellent first lady — but this is my story. . . . I’m not bitter because, if it wasn’t for my divorce, I would never have met my wife Linda, and she’s the greatest thing in my life — but [the facts] aren’t pleasant to Jill and Joe.” Most of the media have rigorously ignored all of this. The New York Times hasn’t even mentioned Bill Stevenson’s story, though the headlines that tempt me on its site as I write these words include “Stephen Colbert Refuses to Watch Night 3 of the RNC.”

Biden’s voter pitch is this: Ignore a half-century record of dishonesty, incompetence, and wretched judgment and think only this: “Joe’s a nice guy who reaches across the aisle.” It may work, given exogenous circumstances, but then again, as Barack Obama reportedly said in private during this year’s primaries, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.”

With the aid of the electronic media that have no time to delve into the longest record any presidential candidate has ever had because they’re too busy sounding the alarm about what tweets cause Eric Trump to hit the “Like” button, Biden hopes we will turn a blind eye to how he turned a blind eye to how his family got rich dangling access to him. The corruption of these acts was comically undisguised: “Don’t worry about investors,” his brother James “Jimmy” Biden reportedly said after taking over Paradigm Global Investors. “We’ve got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.” He added, according to a former colleague, “We’ve got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company.” Politico’s grueling exposé “Biden, Inc.” is sordid and thorough, and Biden’s campaign declined to comment on its swampy details.

When Joe was overseeing the U.S. occupation of Iraq in 2011, by sheer coincidence one of Jimmy Biden’s companies secured a $1.5 billion contract to build housing there, and while Joe was overseeing the U.S. response to Russian actions in Ukraine, a $50,000-a-month gig on the board of Ukrainian gas firm Burisma happened to fall into the lucky Hunter Biden’s lap. Joe, in 2013, even took Hunter on Air Force Two to China, where son introduced dad to a Chinese businessman and, twelve days later, found himself a board member of the businessman’s new private-equity fund, with a 10 percent stake. Even Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, has exploited the business possibilities of being a Biden and makes a mint off public-speaking fees and such gambits as a 2013 junket to Azerbaijan, funded by a state oil company, that was labeled “an attempt at foreign influence” by the Obama Justice Department. A 2008 report by a good-government group dubbed Biden “one of the top five senators paying the most money in salaries or fees to family members.” Biden is as much a swamp creature as Shrek.

In addition to being unprincipled, dishonest, and wreathed by such a strong odor of methane that he might as well be wearing Musk de Marsh cologne, Biden is — how to put this delicately? — not the shiniest cufflink in the box. This was true long before Obama aides “would chortle at how Biden, like an elderly uncle at Thanksgiving, would launch into extended monologues that everyone had heard before,” as Politico reported. Biden repeated third grade, earned mostly C’s and D’s in his first three semesters at the University of Delaware, then finished 76th in a class of 85 at Syracuse Law School. As usual, he lied about this c.v. item, in a famous 1987 exchange with a reporter in which he claimed he had gone to law school on a full academic scholarship (false), had graduated in the top half of his class (untrue), and had racked up three undergraduate degrees (off by two). He lied at least three times about getting arrested trying to see Nelson Mandela and even claimed Mandela warmly embraced him as thanks for this fictitious accomplishment. He lied comprehensively about a supposed dramatic moment in Afghanistan where he claimed to have pinned a Silver Star on a soldier who then died, telling his rapt audience, “This is the God’s truth,” as though channeling the spirit of his dad trying to unload a wheezing Chevy Corvair. “Character is on the ballot,” Uncle Joe likes to tell us. Is it? Will we be able to select a knight of virtue, or even an obviously decent bloke, this November? I’d say what we have on the ballot is two characters.

Maybe what’s really on the ballot is not so much character differences as policy ones. They’re stark. Biden is the first candidate anyone can remember who, after securing his party’s nomination, veered back to his base instead of the center, his hand forced by the weak fundraising and lackluster interest from the party’s true believers. Biden threw himself at the feet of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when he endorsed a version of the Green New Deal with a price tag of some $2 trillion, with which he vows to “rewrite our economy” via “environmental justice,” earmarking 40 percent of “investment in a clean energy revolution” in “disadvantaged communities.” All of this spending and redistribution would buy us a reduction in global temperatures of one-fifth of one degree centigrade, according to Benjamin Zycher, an energy economist at the American Enterprise Institute, who points out that the U.S. is responsible for only 15 percent of global carbon emissions. This looks like a case of Democrats aching to push through yet another of their economic-justice programs based on a pretext.

Biden chose for his running mate Kamala Harris, who according to YouGov was the single most liberal senator in 2019, and whose recent proposals include confiscating guns, packing the Supreme Court, and abolishing the filibuster — a move at which Biden is now saying he would “take a look” if he finds Republicans “obstreperous,” raising the unnerving prospect of New Deal–scale changes being rammed through with as few as 50 Senate votes. Biden has said he would double the capital-gains tax rate to 39.5 percent for “every single solitary person” as part of a $4 trillion tax hike over ten years. (By comparison, Hillary Clinton’s tax-increase proposal amounted to $1 trillion.) Biden’s plan to create a “public option” for health insurance would gradually kill off private health insurance since no ordinary insurer would be able to compete. Biden these days is simply a better-groomed Bernie Sanders, which is why Obama was correct to say that the two longtime colleagues’ goals are “not that different, from a forty-thousand-foot level.”

Because this is now party dogma, Biden calls transgender equality “the civil-rights issue of our time,” which is code for “I will empower the federal government to back any biological males who demand access to your girls’ restrooms and locker rooms and showers and track meets and soccer teams.” The Supreme Court has already laid the groundwork for this position, and Biden would build on it yet another giant, intrusive federal bureaucracy. Biden apparently thinks he already has the authority to do all this under the misnamed Equality Act and has vowed to use executive orders to reverse “discriminatory actions” taken by Trump that authorize schools and other authorities to continue to draw distinctions between male and female. Biden’s commitment to deploying government at its most heavy-handed should not be doubted. He wrote the 1984 law that led to a breathtaking increase in civil-asset forfeiture and exclaimed, in 1991, “Under our forfeiture statutes, the government can take everything you own. Everything from your car, to your house, to your bank account, not merely what they confiscate in terms of the dollars of the transaction you’ve been caught engaging in. They can take everything!”

Under a Biden administration that was able to replace any of the right-leaning justices on the Supreme Court, the Equality Act would render moot the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and make it open season for litigation against any Catholic institution around the country that may disagree with the new wisdom on sex and sexuality. Biden, the kind of Catholic who has officiated at a same-sex wedding, backs federal funding for abortions, and selected as his running mate a politician who suggested that membership in the Knights of Columbus is disqualifying for a judge, isn’t being at all secretive about these plans. His website promises that he will “empower federal agencies to be champions for equality,” that he will “nominate and appoint federal officials and judges who represent the diversity of American people, including LGBTQ+ people,” and that he will “ensure that we give the agencies charged with enforcing our non-discrimination laws the funds they need to fully pursue this obligation.” Gulp.

These issues were just beginning to bubble up in the last couple of years of the Obama administration, but today, after a four-year armistice in what might reasonably be labeled Sexual Revolution 2: Gay and Transgender Boogaloo, there is furious pent-up demand on the left to punish Trump voters with the new sexual-identity agenda, and Biden has promised to give them everything they want. The retirement of, say, Clarence Thomas (aged 72) during a Biden administration would remove the only serious impediment to a ground-up reworking of what sex and gender mean in the United States. Biden wouldn’t necessarily even need the backing of Congress to effect these changes. Or do you think a five-justice liberal majority on the Supreme Court would lift a finger to cancel executive orders pitched as defenses of “the civil-rights issue of our time”? Once implemented, even the most spurious executive orders can prove surprisingly durable, if they advance the progressive cause.

When Biden says, as he did in his DNC acceptance speech, “we can choose the path of becoming angrier, less hopeful, and more divided. A path of shadow and suspicion. Or we can choose a different path, and together, take this chance to heal, to be reborn, to unite,” he is speaking the same language as Obama: Elect me, and I’ll end divisiveness by quickly ramming through major changes opposed by most Americans. Then I’ll announce that anyone who opposes me is getting in the way of history’s inevitable journey to progress. This is where the rubber of political correctness meets the road of disturbing and perhaps irreversible policy change. Silly identity-politics games are not just for college kids anymore; the lawyers are now fully in charge of PC, Inc.

Obsessive deference to political correctness can have even more catastrophic consequences. Recall that when Trump announced his partial travel ban on flights from China on January 31, there was much talk in the media about how anti-Asian racism was the real danger. Biden was fully on board, saying at a campaign event the same day Trump announced the restrictions that Americans “need to have a president who they can trust what he says about it, that he is going to act rationally about it,” adding, “this is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia — hysterical xenophobia — and fearmongering to lead the way instead of science.” Biden, abetted by a furious fusillade of fact-checkers, has insisted that he just coincidentally happened to be musing in a general way about Trump’s supposed xenophobia on that day, not referring to the travel restrictions that were the major topic of national discussion. Sure. As late as March 12, after Trump ordered a similar clampdown on travel from Europe, Biden still didn’t like the idea of even partially shutting down flights, saying, “Travel restrictions based on favoritism and politics rather than risks will be counterproductive.” Ask yourself: When a virus has racial connotations, or reacting to it can be labeled “xenophobic,” how eager would a President Biden be to cut off the country where it originated? Days, we later learned, mattered. It might have been weeks before Biden decided he was ready to risk a little xenophobia to fight a deadly contagion. When he finally announced he supported Trump’s partial shutdown on China travel, it was . . . April 3. This time Biden’s claim was that Trump had been far too slow to make the move.

Biden’s supporters sometimes say they back him in the name of normalcy, but the stray-voltage aspect of the incumbent president is not exactly alien to his would-be usurper. Biden told a black reporter who asked whether he had ever taken a cognitive test, “That’s like saying you . . . before you got in this program, you’re take [sic] a test whether you’re taking cocaine or not. What do you think? Huh? Are you a junkie?” An unfiltered and vindicated President Joe, at last in the center of the spotlight, would likely uncork so many wild and woolly thoughts that he might give the Donald a run for his money. Those who think Biden might restore gravitas to the Oval Office might be neglecting to remember that he mused about taking Donald Trump “behind the gym [to] beat the hell out of him,” has a habit of publicly trying out a mock-Indian accent or a mock black accent (“They’re gonna put y’all back in chains”), referred to lenders as “these Shylocks who took advantage of these women and men while overseas,” declared that Obama was “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean,” touched women and little girls in ways that made them uncomfortable, and once told a stunned adolescent girl, according to her, “You’re very well-endowed for 14!” A break from embarrassing presidential utterings is not on the ballot.

Those who fret that the current president is not always being forthright should note that Biden, who suffered two brain aneurysms in 1988, which required a seven-month break from his Senate duties and which were so grave he was given only a 50 percent chance of survival by doctors, has not released any medical records in twelve years, when he first ran for veep and revealed that he suffered from an irregular heartbeat. Studies link aneurysms to decreased life expectancy, which for a man of Biden’s age is already less than ten years. Biden will, on Election Day, be exactly as old as Ronald Reagan was on his last day in office and a couple of weeks shy of his 78th birthday. Every day his administration lasts he will set a new record for the oldest chief executive in the history of the United States.

Alas, Abraham Lincoln is not on the ballot this year. Two flawed men present themselves for our inspection. Biden may promise “hope and light and love,” but that is merely the accepted euphemism for greatly expanded federal powers to reshape everything from the energy sector to girls’ locker rooms. The distractions of personality foibles, Twitter wars, and misadventures in assertions of truth aside, the crux of this election is that we are confronted as usual with one party that says, “Let’s get to work reshaping everything in the United States” and another party that says, “Let’s not.”