Saturday, January 19, 2013

Joe Biden's Latest Manti Te'o Moment

While the media is hard at work trying to uncover why a star linebacker for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team would tug at everyone's hearts over an imaginary girlfried who we were told tragically died of leukemia just hours after his real grandmother died, we're once again faced with yet another Joe Biden lie, one in a long line throughout his political career that always seem to be quickly brushed aside by the media. During  a meeting of mayors this week in Washington on the issue of gun control, Vice President Biden claimed for the first time publicly that he heard the gunshots of a deadly shooting at an Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania back in 2006 while he was playing golf at a nearby golf course. Like so many things he's recounted in his public speaking in the past, the claim is simply untrue. The Washington Times' Dave Boyer explains why it never happened.
I happened to be literally — probably, it turned out, to be a quarter of a mile [away] at an outing when I heard gunshots in the woods,” Mr. Biden recounted. “We didn’t know … we thought they were hunters.”
But a search of maps of the area in Lancaster County, Pa., shows the nearest golf course to the site of the shooting, Moccasin Run Golf Club, is about five miles away. Rodney King, the golf pro at Moccasin Run, said Friday he was working at the course on the day of the shooting and never saw Mr. Biden, who was then a U.S. senator.
“There’s a lot of things here that I find hard to believe,” Mr. King said. “I looked in my database, and he [Mr. Biden] is not in my database.”
Even if Mr. Biden had played at the course that day, Mr. King said, “It’s very far-fetched that he would have heard it.”
“I know he didn’t hear those gunshots,” Mr. King said. “They were inside the school. Even if they were outside, he wouldn’t have heard them.”
Boyer reminds us that Biden similarly made up a story about being shot at during a trip to Iraq in 2007. There's also the case of Biden lying about the grades he earned in law school, plagiarizing his work as a law student and plagiarizing a speech originally delivered by British Labor leader Neil Kinnock when Biden first ran for president. There's also Biden's false and particularly hurtful claim that the truck driver who struck an automobile driven by his first wife in 1972, killing her and his young daughter, was drunk at the time of the accident. Investigators found no evidence of alcohol consumption. It was believed that Biden's wife was distracted by one of her children in her car and pulled into an intersection in front of the oncoming truck, whose driver was unable to avoid hitting her car. Given the choice of concern between Manti Te'o's imaginary girlfried and Biden's well-document record of pathological lying, I'm far more concerned about the actions of the guy who's one heart beat away from the president than a 21-year old college football player.

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