Calling Joe Biden a Pathological Liar is the One Thing George Santos Got Right

AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

President Joe Biden and Congressman-elect George Santos have more in common than either would like to admit.

Last year, Santos, a Republican who prevailed in the midterm election for New York’s third congressional district, shout-tweeted that “BIDEN IS A PATHOLOGICAL LIAR!”

Now that it’s apparent that Santos has lied about, among other things, his education, job experience, religious affiliation, and mother’s death, the calls for the physician to heal himself are much deserved. Santos belongs nowhere near the Capitol, where he arrived Tuesday for the first day of the new Congress.

But was his absurdly hypocritical and inelegant utterance about Biden a rare occasion on which Santos stumbled upon the truth?

To be clear, Biden and Santos are not the same. The former doesn’t lie with the bravado, flair, and frequency that the latter does; it took Santos one election cycle to exceed the number and scale of deceptions that Biden has over the course of a career. While Biden mostly embellishes and twists — only outright fabricating on occasion — George Santos invented an entirely different person to run for office in his name.

Still, the president has his own lengthy history of telling self-aggrandizing fibs about his own life.

Contra Joe Biden, there is no evidence that Joe Biden was a civil rights activist. He was not in the top of his class at law school, which he did not attend on a full scholarship. He did not face enemy bullets in Iraq or pin a medal on a brave soldier in Kunar province, Afghanistan, against the wishes of his security detail. But he’s claimed all of this and so much more.

The Biden of Biden’s own mind is courageous, indeed. On the campaign trail in 2019, Biden told crowds that he was asked to pin a silver star on a Navy man who had at great personal risk tried to rescue one of his comrades in Kunar province, Afghanistan. Biden himself was willing to put himself at great personal risk to do so, according to Biden.

“Everybody got concerned a vice president going up in the middle of this,” remembered Biden. “But we can lose a vice president, we can’t lose many more of these kids, not a joke.”

It wasn’t a joke, per se, but it shared the quality of not being true with a joke. Biden never visited Kunar province in Afghanistan, although he did pin a Bronze Star on an army officer in another province at another date. There’s no indication other than Biden’s word that he was in danger on the trip. Nor is there evidence he was “shot at” in Iraq, as he claims.

There is similarly nothing except Biden’s own word to suggest that he participated in civil rights marches or sit-ins, or was arrested for his activism. In a speech at a historically black college last January, he reflected that “it seems like yesterday the first time I got arrested” for standing up for a black family in Delaware, but no record of his being arrested exists. Nevertheless, Biden has leaned on these anecdotes, which are especially useful in light of his friendships with and lionization of segregationists such as Strom Thurmond, whose “powerful and lasting impact” Biden called Thurmond’s “gift to all of us.”

Biden professed to have observed a heartfelt change in Thurmond over the years, and had to navigate a personal and working relationship his fellow senator, so perhaps the admiration can be dismissed as innocent. But as David Harsanyi has argued, it’s hard to give Biden the benefit of the doubt in light of his dubious claim to being active in the civil rights movement, and declaration that Mitt Romney would put Black Americans “back in chains” during the 2012 election. Politics is a dirty game, but Biden has shown a remarkable willingness to dishonestly use racial issues to his advantage.

These examples pale in comparison to the lies that put an early end to Biden’s 1988 campaign to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president. Confronting a voter who questioned his academic record, Biden responded with the following tirade:

I think I have a much higher IQ than you, I suspect. I went to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship. The first year in law school, I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class. And then decided I wanted to stay and went back to law school and, in fact, ended up in the top half of my class. I won the international moot court competition. I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year. I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits; you only needed 123 credits. I would be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours, Frank.

It’s quite the refutation. Except Biden finished in the bottom third of his law school class (76th out of 85), was not the recipient of a full academic scholarship, and exaggerated the number of undergraduate degrees he earned by two. Biden’s lies about his below-average to slightly-below-average academic record (Frank, whatever his IQ, was right!) and plagiarism of British Labour leader Neil Kinnock resulted in his withdrawal from the contest.

The most damning example of Biden’s careless tongue at work involves the most tragic moment of his life. In 1972, his wife, Neilia, and one-year-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car accident. It was an unspeakable tragedy.

Strangely, Biden took comfort in telling audiences that the tractor-trailer driver whose vehicle collided with the one driven by Neilia was not only at fault, but had drunkenly murdered his family.

“It was an errant driver who stopped to drink instead of drive and hit a tractor-trailer, hit my children and my wife and killed them,” said Biden in describing the alleged culprit. On another occasion, Biden declared regaled a crowd with the tall tale of  “a guy who allegedly — and I never pursued it — drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch” and ‘broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly, and killed my daughter instantly.”

Biden “never pursued it” because there was no evidence to suggest that the driver, Curtis Dunn had been drinking that day. Dunn was never charged with any crime, as eyewitnesses told authorities that Neilia Biden had pulled into Dunn’s path despite the fact that she had a stop sign and he did not.

Jerome Herlihy, who investigated the crash has told the press that “there was no indication that the truck driver had been drinking.” Far from mercifully choosing not to press charges, Biden had cruelly fabricated the “allegation” that Dunn was drunk, much to the chagrin of his family members who said he was “haunted” and “tormented” by the accident.

Joe Biden is a serial fabulist. He lies about politics, yes. Big deal. But he also lies about himself — to take credit for things he hasn’t done, abilities he doesn’t have, and courage he hasn’t demonstrated. He lies without regard for how it might hurt others. He lies about how his own wife and daughter died. He will not stop lying for as long as he remains in the public eye.

What really distinguishes Biden and Santos, though, is that Biden has always held enough influence to avoid the political death sentence Santos likely faces, or the kind of scrutiny that his predecessor faced; the presidential lie-counter that the Washington Post was keeping was for some reason retired upon Donald Trump’s departure from the White House. But that’s an indictment of others, not a vindication of Biden, and a reason to take many of his utterances from behind the presidential seal with the truckload of salt they merit.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.