posted September 06, 2008 05:52 PM            

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Thursday, August 28, 2008
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In an act of reprehensible cruelty, then-presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden while campaigning in Iowa last year blamed the car accident in which his wife and daughter were killed on a drunk driver. The claim was completely false. The car accident was in fact his own wife's fault. Apparently distracted by one of the three children in the car with her, she accelerated into the path of an oncoming truck which could not stop to avoid her car. Celia Cohen explains at the Delaware Grapevine in a story entitled, "It Ain't So, Joe":

If ever there was a crash that tugged at the heart of the entire state, it was the one that took the lives of Joe Biden’s wife and baby daughter and hospitalized his two toddler sons 35 years ago, just weeks after his precocious election to the U.S. Senate.

It was an unbearable turn of events, from one of the most daring political breakthroughs in Delaware political history to unspeakable grief, and there is no reason to make the accident appear worse than it was.

While campaigning in Iowa for the Democratic presidential nomination, however, Biden did.

“Let me tell you a little story,” he was quoted as saying last Friday in the New York Times.

“I got elected when I was 29, and I got elected November the 7th. And on December 18 of that year, my wife and three kids were Christmas shopping for a Christmas tree. A tractor-trailer, a guy who allegedly – and I never pursued it – 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, with what were thought to be at the time permanent, fundamental injuries.”

Except there was no drinking. There was not even speeding. The truck’s brakes checked out, as well. It was not the driver’s fault.

Biden quickly abandoned the drunk driving claim when he was called out on it. “All I said was what I heard at the time. What I heard from folks at the time is he’d been drinking,” Biden said, sounding agitated. “I don’t want to talk about it. . . . She must have pulled out. . . . It’s still painful to talk about 35 years later.” Imagine the pain of the innocent truck driver's family that he was being falsely accused by a U.S. senator and presidential candidate of getting drunk and slamming into Biden's wife car, killing her and his daughter? Cohen explains that embellishment and plagiarism are not unfamiliar territory to Biden:

The embellishment is reminiscent of one of the problems that undid Biden the last time he ran for president 20 years ago. He was swallowed up mostly by plagiarism charges, but there was also an incident, taped by C-SPAN, in which Biden became irritated with a New Hampshire voter and belittled him by inflating his own uneven academic credentials.

Among Biden’s claims, he said he was named the outstanding student in political science at the University of Delaware and was in the top half of his law school class at Syracuse University, both untrue, and won an international moot court competition, which was true. He also gibed, “I’d be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours.”

As I said when Obama picked Biden, the two are meant for each other. They are the most pathological, self-absorbed people you will encounter in American politics today. Now the mainstream media will not share stories like this which reflect on the true character of Biden or Obama. So pass this story along to your friends. It says a lot about Joe Biden and the person who admired him so much that he put him on his presidential ticket with him.

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