Joe Biden Keeps Lying That His Son Died in Iraq
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“My son was a major in the U.S. Army,” Joe Biden told Marines stationed in Japan on Thursday. “We lost him in Iraq.”
Beau Biden died in Bethesda, not Baghdad. He did so six years after he took his last step in Iraq.
The president’s son served honorably and sacrificed much, particularly when considering that back home a wife, two kids, and a job as attorney general of Delaware waited for him. His father served as vice president for much of Beau Biden’s time in Iraq, so he did not benefit, at least in the location of his deployment, from the special treatment that occasionally shields the children of politicians from unpleasant duty.
All that does not grant anyone the right to insinuate that he made the ultimate sacrifice, as about 4,500 of his fellow American servicemen did.
The president apparently believes, or feigns to believe, that the existence of burn pits to dispose of trash caused his son’s death, and his votaries, including one who accused his critics of “ignoring the full story,” go along with his specious claim or pretend that he does not keep repeating this canard.
Incinerating trash predates Operation Iraqi Freedom, and burn pits — which exist stateside among civilians, too — rank significantly below IEDs in terms of wartime dangers.
Do burn pits even cause cancer? Joe Jackson, a scientist of song, famously sang, “Everything gives you cancer.” One guesses that this includes huffing the fumes from a burn pit. Guesses aside, actual scientific data does not support the president’s claims.
“Existing statistics do not indicate that Iraq veterans are more affected by brain cancer than other veteran groups,” FactCheck.org reports, “although no comprehensive data is available to definitively say one way or the other.” The group’s headline said, “Biden exaggerates the science on burn pits and brain cancer.”
“A 2011 report from the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) found that there was limited/suggestive evidence of a link between exposure to combustion products and reduced lung function in the populations studied,” the American Cancer Society reports of the burn pits, “but there was inadequate/insufficient evidence of a link at that time between combustion products and cancer.”
The military occupation of Major Biden, of course, was not burn-pit operator. He worked as a lawyer. Presumably, the office in which he toiled did not keep an internal, eternal burn pit alight at the center of the cubicles. So, the question of the cancerous toxicity of the trash bonfires seems a moot one in reference to a guy who worked far away from them and indoors. Even beyond this stolen-valor-by-proxy claim stands the black-and-white element of Biden’s remark: he did not lose his son in Iraq. His son died in Maryland.
In fairness to the president, saying he lies about his deceased son misleads. He lies about an assortment of his dead relatives.
“My Grand Pop” (any relation to Corn Pop?), he said last month, “who I never met, he died in the same hospital I was born in two weeks before I was born.” Whereas Joe Biden entered the world in Scranton in 1942, his grandfather died in Baltimore the previous year.
Biden maintained for years that a drunk driver killed his wife and daughter. In 2007, for instance, he told an audience that a truck driver who allegedly “drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family and killed my wife instantly and killed my daughter instantly and hospitalized my two sons.” Biden’s late wife, who allegedly held her baby in her lap as she drove, ran a stop sign. No sign or signal indicated to the trucker to stop. Delaware Superior Court Judge Jerome O. Herlihy, who oversaw the matter as a prosecutor, categorically ruled out alcohol in either party causing the accident.
Joe Biden, losing a wife and children, certainly dealt with an unfair share of tragedy in his life. People grieve in different ways. But carting out dead relatives to gain sympathy with voters by embellishing their manner of death amounts to not a mode of grief but exploitation.
WWGWD? — What would George Washington do — makes for a good guide for politicians. WWGSD? — What would George Santos do — makes for a bad one.
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