Tag Archives: Biden gaffes

national news

Trump’s lies, uh, trump Biden’s mistakes

Donald Trump is trying to make some hay over Joe Biden’s misstatements.

He said “Sleepy Joe” is not up to the job of president of the United States. The president’s surrogates, such as his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, question Biden’s “acuity.” Trump is trying as well to turn the Democratic Party primary frontrunner into an incompetent candidate for the nation’s highest office.

May I weigh in here? No need to answer that. This is my blog and I’ll weigh in anyhow.

Donald Trump’s incessant, relentless lies suggest to me a sociopathic tendency. He lies without any care for the consequence. Sociopathic behavior, to my understanding, suggests a form of amorality … which defines Donald Trump to the letter.

I am inclined to wish that the former vice president gets himself into full campaign shape soon. He’s not there yet. The mistakes, the gaffes and the stumble-bum speechmaking open Biden up to the kind of criticism that Trump and his allies will hurl at him. What’s more, it will stick with that base of voters on whom Trump is depending.

I want to look past all this immediate stuff. I want to examine the Democratic front runner’s lengthy public service career. Has it been hiccup-free? Of course. I concede the point about the plagiarism accusation that dogged him during a 1988 presidential campaign. He tried again in 2008, only to lose the Democratic nomination to Sen. Barack Obama, who then selected him to serve as vice president.

He served for 36 years in the Senate. He chaired the Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees. He built a mountain of credibility and has forged alliances and friendships with politicians on both sides of the aisle and both ends of the spectrum.

I just want him to sharpen his message.

As for Trump, he is a lost cause. Watch any of those campaign rally riffs on which he lets loose and you get my drift. Or at least you should get it. When he’s not making an ass of himself, he is lying to our faces.

But the MAGA-philes love it. Good for them. They and their hero — Donald Trump — deserve each other.

national news

Biden’s gaffes don’t measure up to Trump’s lies

Oh, here we go again.

Joe Biden said that the Parkland shooting survivors called him while he served as vice president of the United States.

Oops! Except that the high school massacre occurred in 2018; Biden left the vice presidency in January 2017.

The gaffes have been piling up lately. The former VP blurted out he would accept “truth over facts.” Before that he uttered something about “poor kids” doing as well academically as “white kids.”

My goodness. The gaffes reportedly have Democratic voters worried about the former vice president’s intellectual stamina were he to secure the party nomination and then face off against Donald J. Trump.

Which brings me to my point. Are the Biden gaffes as serious as the Trump lies? Hah! Not even close, man! The Trump penchant for prevarication is much, much worse than the occasional blooper that flies out of Biden’s trap.

However … we have this problem with Trump’s incessant lying. We’re getting used to it! The Trump lies — which have totaled something far north of 10,000 since he became president — are becoming part of the dialogue these days. “It’s just Trump,” some Americans are saying.

Many voters don’t seem to care that the president cannot tell the truth if his life depended on it. He lies about everything. Big things. Small things. Important matters. Trivial matters. Trump lies when the truth wouldn’t hurt him in the least. He just lies.

It’s pathological, man … which is how I believe Ben Carson, the nation’s housing secretary, described it when he and Trump were competing for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

If Biden manages to win the Democratic nomination, all of us — you and me — can expect the president to seek to make hay over Biden’s occasional verbal hiccups.

My question is this: Are we going to hold the president to any kind of truth-telling standard? We damn sure had better.