Uncle Joe's Folksy Foolery

The New York Times did a deep dive into its thesaurus over the weekend, and came up burbling more euphemisms and excuses for Joe Biden's serial lying habit than I ever thought could be contained in just one little "think-piece."

Such infamous whoppers as Biden claiming personal involvement and even arrests in civil rights protests, his house once almost burning to the ground after a lightning strike, his going to college on a full scholarship and graduating at the top of his law school class, his theft of a British politician's hard-luck life story all get explained away by the Times and its sources. The lies are magically transformed into "embellishments," "exaggerations," "folksiness," "yarn-spinning," "grandfatherly," and "relatable story-telling."

Biden's apologists both inside and outside of the White House bizarrely cast his serial prevarications as proof of what a decent, honest man he truly is. What in lesser mortals might be diagnosed as a profound character flaw or a personality disorder becomes empathy gone wild in the president of the United States. Biden tells his self-aggrandizing lies purely out of selfless concern for, and solidarity with, the common man.

 “President Biden has brought honesty and integrity back to the Oval Office,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman. “Like he promised, he gives the American people the truth right from the shoulder and takes pride in being straight with the country about his agenda and his values; including by sharing life experiences that have shaped his outlook and that hardworking people relate to.”

The Times then reverts to formula, covering its own journalistic ass by allowing a contrarian ethicist to briefly weigh in and to actually utter the words "lies" and "falsehoods" as they pertain to Biden. However, this pseudo-balancing act comes only after several paragraphs of defensive bathos,  and only after the obligatory observation that Donald Trump is the undisputed grand champion of presidential lying. He set the bar conveniently low for Biden and for all presidents. Truth and lies - and their importance - now might as well be included in the doctrine of Unitary Executive Power, in which US presidents redefine not only the Constitution, but reality itself, bequeathing their pathologies to their successors and enshrining them as the "new normal" - or, if you will, Normalcy, which Calvin Coolidge effectively decreed would replace the word "normality" in the dictionary. 

Meanwhile, assuming that the Times is wrong, and that you actually do care about Biden's lies as well as about the possible blowback from his bellicose rhetoric, how can you tell when he is, in fact, lying?  Could he possibly be as much a chronic liar as, say, the stereotypical teenager?

Probably not, but there are a few "tells" to help those of you who think that Uncle Joe's folksy warning last week (to a roomful of billionaires with deep donor pockets) about the coming Armageddon could indicate a disturbing cross between Chicken Little and The Boy Who Cried Wolf. 

Whenever Biden moves his mouth, and intersperses a remark or an anecdote or a doomsday warning with the phrases "This is the God's honest truth," "I give you my word as a Biden, " No Joke!," "This Is Not Hyperbole" or "No Lie!" grab the salt shaker off the table pronto, and take it with the requisite grain or two.

The context and the settings in which he says stuff are also important clues. For example, if he reminisces about growing up among Puerto Ricans during a visit to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, your confabulation-detector should start buzzing right away.

This also applies to the luxury setting last week in which he recklessly sounded the alarm about nuclear Armageddon.  According to the press pool report of the private event, Biden meandered through his standard talking points before concluding with Putin:

We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis. Weve got a guy I know fairly well, he said of Putin. Hes not joking (my bold) when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is you might say significantly underperforming. I don't think there's any such thing as the ability to easily (use) a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon. I didnt realize how much serious damage the previous administration did to our foreign policy.

Pool listened to the remarks from a staircase next to the room where the event was taking place and could not see much. Looked like there were large art pieces on every wall around the room. We were ushered out at 7:53 as Sen. Peters took the mic. We came in as James Murdoch was introducing the president. There was a lectern set up but the President moved to the middle of the room.

So... is Biden's assertion that Putin is not "joking" a tacit acknowledgment that it takes a liar to know a liar? What's more, Putin did not so much directly threaten nuclear war in a speech last week as he observed that the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Japan at the end of World War II. Whether this should be interpreted as a veiled threat is up for debate.

It's telling that the press were crammed into a stairwell during the glitzy fundraiser and thus could see neither Biden's facial expression nor those of his audience. Were these wealthy people looking fidgety and bored as the president droned on and on with his standard stump speech? Did Biden sense this, and think he could get them to write bigger checks if he put a little unscripted folksy nuclear fear into the mix?

After all, thanks to the Citizens United ruling, unlimited dollars are weighted votes with a lot more power than the standard human vote. And billionaires are a pretty paranoid bunch to begin with. Just look as Jeff Bezos thinking he can escape the global catastrophes that obscene wealth has wrought by colonizing Mars. Just think about Mark Zuckerberg urging everyone to don one of his reality-denying headsets and join him in an alternate cartoon Metaverse. 

The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them. – Elena Gorokhova