I am not going to commit an act of stolen punditry here. Full credit goes to the boss, who for years has referred to Joe Biden as 20 pounds of bull excrement in a 10 pound bag. Weights and measures may have varied over the years, and the ratio may be expanding the older the President gets, but the analytical point by Ed is well-taken.
Just within the last 30 days or so, Joe Biden visited Warsaw, Poland, and said when he was growing up in Delaware, everyone was either Catholic or had an -SKI or -O on the end of their last name. On St. Patrick’s Day, he played up the Irish pandering to full blarney. And on Wednesday, Greek Independence day, Biden made his annual pandering remarks about how Greek he really is.
Honestly, since becoming president, he has used the bully pulpit to be Puerto Rican, Jewish, Irish, Polish, Greek, and being close enough to being black that he was part of the civil rights movement. Of course, none of that is true, and Biden himself had to come to terms with his biographical fiction in his infamous press conference during the Neil Kinnock plagiarism scandal.
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Let’s go to the claim Biden made Wednesday in the East Room of the White House.
So his claim is that he was presumably given the nickname Joe Bidenopoulos by his Greek political advisors when he ran for Senate in 1973 as a 29-year old. Discard for a bit that he only gives any credit to the Greek vote for putting him over the top in that race on a Greek holiday when he’s giving a speech. If he’s addressing any other nationality, they’re the reason he won. That’s the Biden way.
When I first heard the name Joe Bidenopoulos, the cynical side of me instantly thought that the only Greek politico Biden could think of was George Stephanopoulos, the long-time Democratic political operative that inflicted William Jefferson Blythe Clinton upon us during what we now call the Locust Years. Stephanopoulos somehow managed to get a job in journalism at ABC despite being a Democratic operative and has conducted interviews like a very carefully edited one early in Biden’s presidency to protect Democrats. He’s moderated Republican debates like the one in 2012 that derailed Mitt Romney into having to defend against banning birth control, an issue around which there was no proposed legislation, or any campaign policy suggestions. It was simply Stephanopoulos using his new role to do what he’d always done as an adult – campaign and cover for Democrats and make Republicans look bad. He’s a partisan.
So my assumption was that Biden was paying homage to his friend George with the Bidenopoulos bit, but then he said he was given that nickname back in 1973. George was born in 1961. He would have been in 6th grade when Biden would have been given that name, so that doesn’t work. Then I did a little digging around, something you won’t find Glenn Kessler doing any of at the Washington Post, because fact-checking only applies to one party these days, and the Democrats are not that party.
Arlette Saenz back in August of 2012 wrote a piece in ABC News after a campaign stop in Warren, Ohio when Joe Biden was vice president.
Vice President Joe Biden gave himself a new nickname today when he introduced himself to three Greek men seated at a table at the Mocha House in Warren, Ohio
“I’m Joe Bidenopoulos,” Biden said.
The vice president, who is of Irish ancestry, chatted briefly with the trio telling them to “Ask George who’s the most Greek Irishman he’s ever known.”
So now we have a discrepancy on Joe Bidenopoulos’ timeline. In 2012, Joe says he created his own name, intimating that he indeed created the name as a tribute to Stephanopoulos, and that you can go ask George who’s the most Greek Irishman he knows. Yet Wednesday at the White House, he claims others gave him that name back in 1973 in Delaware. Stephanopoulos was 12-years old going to school in Massachusetts. Not a chance they would have crossed paths, even with as creepy as Biden is around young kids.
Let’s just make sure we keep the record clear when it comes to Joe Biden. He isn’t Greek. He isn’t Puerto Rican. He isn’t black. He isn’t Jewish. He’s not a truck driver. He wasn’t involved in the Civil Rights movement. He was called a professor at Penn, but never taught a class. I guess that makes him a PINO (Professor In Name Only). He wasn’t congratulated at the White House on traveling two million miles by rail by an Amtrak conductor because the conductor had retired and died years before. He never gave his Uncle Frank a Purple Heart at the White House. His house didn’t burn to the ground. His son wasn’t killed in Iraq. He was not the top of his class in law school. He was not a varsity football player on the way to going pro. He didn’t have a job at a timber company. He was not arrested while meeting Nelson Mandela. He did not hit a homerun in a Congressional baseball game. He did not overhear a mass shooting. He is not a cancer survivor. Oil did not rain down on his hometown. He did not go to synagogue on Sunday. His father did not counsel him on 2023 views of same sex marriage when he was in high school in 1957 after allegedly witnessing two men kiss openly one morning when he was going to high school. He did not graduate with three degrees from undergraduate school. He did not get his start at an HBCU. He did not have a full academic scholarship. He has not visited Iraq and Afghanistan 50 times. He did not pin a medal on a heroic naval officer in Afghanistan.
And I’m fairly confident after this parade of biographical bovine stuff that his fight with notorious gang lord Corn Pop around the public pool probably didn’t happen the way Biden claims it did.
Update (Ed): Worth noting — Kessler did cover the gay-kiss claim a couple of weeks ago.
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