I admit that I have not closely followed the story of Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) and the allegations that he made up substantial portions of life story out of whole cloth.
But if what the New York Times has reported about the alleged holes in Santos’ telling of his story is accurate (he says he plans on addressing the allegations next week) then a lot of people have some major explaining to do, including Republican operatives who didn’t do a better job of vetting Santos, Democrats who did a terrible job on the oppo-research front, and perhaps most notably the MSM – whose jobs it is to catch stuff like this.
In response, Politico deputy managing editor Sam Stein (formerly of HuffPo and Daily Beast infamy) took to the Twitter machine Thursday to inquire if there had ever been a situation on par with Santos’ (alleged) made-up history.
“Is there any precedent at all to this George Santos situation?” Stein asked, seemingly insinuating that there hadn’t been. “Has Congress ever had someone with so many remarkable biographical holes?”
Well… yeah, Sam, there has been. You may have heard of him. His name? Joe Biden – happens to be president right now, you know?
Grabien founder/viral video guru Tom Elliott had the answer at the ready, saving many of us a lot of trouble in the process by recounting many of the embellishments and lies told by Joe Biden about his story and that of his family over the course of his multiple decades of “service” in Washington, D.C.
Here’s the list Elliott composed in a mini-Twitter thread:
“— Survived a fire
— Arrested in civil rights march
— Star football player
— Once a truck driver
— Arrested meeting Mandela
— Son killed in Iraq
— Overheard mass shooting
— Top of his class in college
— Hit a 368’ homer in baseball game
— Had job at timber co.
— Drunk driver killed his wife & daughter
— Pinned medal on a Navy captain who was just a kid
— No knowledge of Hunter’s foreign business dealings
— Turned down offer from the Naval Academy
— His uncle won a Purple Heart
— His helicopter in Afghanistan “forced down”
— Met Parkland families as vice president
— Was once a coal miner
— Comes from a family of coal miners
— Was shot at in Iraq
— Called Milosevic a “war criminal” to his face
— Criticized George W. Bush to his face
— Participated in sit-ins during civil rights movement
— Oil industry somehow gave him cancer
— Won a fight against a drug dealer named Cornpop
— Dead Amtrak worker awarded him for riding 1.8 million miles
— Attended Temple services on a Sunday
— Raised in Puerto Rican community
— Worked as a college prof”
There are of course many more where that came from, but the most recent one Elliott mentioned was one Biden told to a group of Delaware veterans he was speaking to last Friday, where he told the story of how when he was Barack Obama’s vice president he supposedly awarded his Uncle Frank the Purple Heart during a family gathering at the urging of his father Joe, Sr.
As we previously reported, in his remarks, Biden said his Uncle Frank won the Purple Heart after fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. According to Biden, his father Joe Biden, Sr. asked him after he was elected Vice President in 2008 to present it to his uncle because “he never got it.” President Biden went on to say that when he did supposedly try to present it to his Uncle Frank that he didn’t want it.
The big problem with this story, as noted by Forbes.com, is that Biden’s uncle and his father both died several years before Biden became Barack Obama’s VP:
President Joe Biden appeared to make a major gaffe Friday when he claimed that after being elected vice president in 2008, he awarded his uncle, Frank Biden, a Purple Heart for his service in World War II, but there are some major holes in his story–primarily the fact his uncle died almost a decade before the 2008 election.
[…]
The president’s father died in 2002; his uncle died in 1999.
[…]
There doesn’t appear to be any record of Biden giving his uncle the honor—the president hasn’t mentioned the story in the past, there have been no news articles written about it and Frank Biden’s name does not appear on a list of recipients held by the National Purple Heart Hall of Honor, though the list is incomplete.
Worse yet, apparently the story was another (made-up) version of a whopper he told in 2019 that sounded very similar:
Biden’s history of getting caught making stuff as he goes all the way back to at least the late 80s during his first failed presidential run when it was discovered that he had plagiarized the work of others and lied about being the first in his family to graduate from college.
But move along, though, nothing here to see. We’re not dealing with a serial liar here. It’s just “Joe being Joe,” as his apologists in the mainstream press have suggested.