This week my friend Charlie Cooke and the Wall Street Journal’s Bill McGurn called attention to Joe Biden’s odd habit of stepping on the stories of the families of some of the 13 troops killed in the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal last week by telling them about Beau’s Army service (in Iraq) and unrelated death. It sometimes feels as though the president is hoping people will mistake him for a Gold Star parent. Biden fans have made a great deal of his supposed gift of empathy, but where exactly is the evidence for that? The New York Times conceded that the case for Bidenian empathy was looking shaky two weeks ago: “Biden Ran on Competence and Empathy. Afghanistan Is Testing That.” Asked about the horrific deaths of Afghans who fell from U.S. airplanes whose exteriors they clung to rather than fall prey to the Taliban, Biden scoffed, with a supreme lack of empathy, “That was four days ago, five days ago.” It had been only two days, but the details would hardly have been made less ghastly if four days had gone by.

When other people tell you about their sorrows, or mention Mitt Romney’s generosity, or ask you about negative campaigning or your lack of discipline, and you respond by talking about the deaths in your own family, it starts to seem more opportunistic and selfish than empathetic. Biden is asking for us to give him our sympathy and support, not offering any particular emotional support in return.

When families have just learnt that their loved ones died in a terror bombing in the last couple of days, it’s rather closer to narcissism than empathy to insist that you already know their stories, so they should instead listen to you grieve for a person you lost six years ago. The fact that Joe Biden has suffered family loss is not the answer to every question, nor can it be a shield against legitimate criticism.