http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/330383/biden-s-private-reality-editors
Joe Biden’s career of intellectual dishonesty is one step short of the Aristotelian ideal: It has a beginning (his law-school plagiarism) and a middle (his later campaign-trail plagiarism), but his performance in the recent debate suggests that it is without end. From misrepresenting Paul Ryan’s legislative record to telling bald-faced lies about his own, the vice president offered a master class in the art of deception.
The Iraq War and the expenses associated with it have become politically unpopular; the same is true to a lesser extent of the war in Afghanistan. Biden blasted Ryan for “voting to put two wars on a credit card, to at the same time put a prescription-drug benefit on the credit card, a trillion-dollar tax cut for [the] very wealthy. I was there. I voted against him.” No, he did no such thing. Biden, as the congressional record shows, voted for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as did the majority of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate. To extend the vice president’s MasterCard metaphor, his signature is right there on the receipt. He did vote against the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, only to support a much more costly entitlement expansion in the form of the Affordable Care Act.
As for the Bush tax cuts, it is true that Biden opposed them in the Senate — right before supporting them as a member of the Obama administration. The Bush tax cuts for those whom Democrats insist on calling “the rich” — families and small businesses with income in excess of $250,000 a year — entailed about $800 billion in forgone revenue according to government estimates. But the expensive part of the equation is the middle-class tax cuts, which added up to some $2.2 trillion in forgone revenue. The Obama-Biden ticket has consistently supported retaining those tax cuts — i.e., the large majority of the Bush tax cuts Biden says he opposes. Which is to say, Biden opposes the billions in tax cuts but supports the trillions in tax cuts, and therefore judges himself to be frugal.
He also misstated by a factor of five the income threshold for which the Obama administration proposes to increase taxes: “The middle class will pay less and people making a million dollars or more will begin to contribute slightly more.” In fact, the administration proposes to raise taxes on individuals making $200,000 a year or more, not $1 million or more.
It is not uncommon for Joe Biden to be off by a factor of five or more. In the same debate he said that Syria “is five times as large geographically” as Libya, when in fact the opposite is closer to the truth: Libya is nearly ten times as large as Syria geographically. That is a simple misstatement, evidence of nothing more than the fact that Biden’s alleged command of foreign-policy details is not quite so impressive as his admirers imagine. But positively untrue statements about his voting record on the wars and his mendacity regarding taxes are evidence of something else: intentional dishonesty. If we bought into the cartoon version of Biden as a middling buffoon, we might come to a different conclusion, but it is difficult to believe that Biden does not know how he voted on the wars or what his administration’s tax policy is. The man is not senescent — he is a skillful demagogue.