The talking points must have gone out within minutes of the end of President Joe Biden’s lame debate performance. Among the first to tell us just how fine a man Biden was Barack Obama, who called his former vice president “someone who has fought for ordinary folks his entire life.” It is, of course, a lie. Biden is not a good man, and the idea he’s “fought for ordinary folks” for even a single day of his “public service” is risible.

Obama’s tweet also claimed that Biden is the candidate “who knows right from wrong and will give it to the American people straight.”  From there, the gaslighting grew exponentially worse.

Part I of “The Real Joe Biden” Series

Part II: Now They’re Gaslighting Us About Biden’s ‘Accomplishments’

At a July 2 fundraiser in Virginia, Democratic Rep. Don Beyer, whom Biden once called “Doug,” compared our disabled president to Jesus.

“​​He has been a good, good man. He’s resilient, optimistic, indefatigable, and above all courageous,” said Boyer.

On the day after the debate, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who admitted that watching the debate made him “weep,” assured us that Biden is “a good man and a good president.”

There are too many post-debate examples to list all the “good man” encomia, but here are few more:

• “​​Biden is widely believed to be a good man” — The Guardian
• The Delaware Democrat is “a good man and a nice man.” — Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear
• “Biden is a good man and has served his country admirably.” — Abigail Disney, granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, and a generous Democratic donor
• “I would still lead with President Biden. He’s a good man.” — Rep. Bennie Thompson, Mississippi Democrat
• Biden “is ultimately a good and decent man.” — Matt Wing, New York Daily News
• “Joe Biden is a good man and has been a good president.” — Rep. Julian Castro, Obama Housing and Urban Development secretary 
• Biden is “decent man of strong character.” — Democratic Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly
• “I love Joe Biden. He’s a good man, he loves his country, he’s doing the best that he can.” — Van Jones, a CNN political commentator
• “He also is a good man, a strong president and Democrats still believe that this race is winnable.” — former Democratic national chair Donna Brazile

Four years ago we were told that Biden was going to return civility and virtue to the White House. Current First Lady Jill Biden said then that “decency is on the ballot.” Michelle Obama swore that Biden was a “profoundly decent man, guided by his faith,” and “as president” he would “honor the lives and experiences of every American — because that’s what he’s always done.” In October 2020, Brit journalist Jonathan Freedland ignorantly insisted that “most” – really, most? – “Americans regard Biden as safe, unthreatening and fundamentally decent.” 

There was even a book published in 2020 that had the title “A Good & Decent Man: Joe Biden: Rescuing America.”

After wading hip deep through the malarkey, let’s look at the Biden record.

The man who occupies the highest office in the world is a pathological liar. We need go no further back than 1987, when he had to drop his campaign for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination because he plagiarized a speech from Neil Kinnock, then a Labor Party member of the British Parliament.

“The tapes of the two speakers, which were eventually aired on U.S. television, show Biden not only echoing Kinnock’s words but aping his gestures,” Time reported in 1987.

Decades earlier, “Biden also failed a course because he wrote a paper that used five pages from a published law-review article without quotation marks or a proper footnote,” Time remembers in a 2019 article.

A decent man would not steal the work of others and claim they were his own.

Biden also lied, Time added, when he rattled “off his academic accomplishments, including saying that he graduated in the top half of his law school, when in fact, he ranked 76th out of 85.”

The truth was also twisted by Biden when he said that he “went to law school on a full academic scholarship,” was “the only one in my class to have full academic scholarship,” and earned three undergraduate degrees. It was a neat package of lies.

There are many other self-aggrandizing inventions, such as his claim that he drove an 18-wheel rig; his oft-repeated implication that late son Beau died a war hero in Iraq; that he was a teen civil rights activist and once arrested for standing up for black family that had moved into a neighborhood during desegregation; that he “had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see (Nelson Mandela) on Robben Island,” a total fabrication; that he was the first in his family to go college (yet Biden also said his grandfather was a star college football player); and that he had been nominated to attend the United States Naval Academy.

The inveterate braggart has also implied that he had an uncle whose last act was to serve as featured guest at a party of cannibals and has told different audiences that he was “brought up by both the Puerto Rican community and the black community,” is “more Jewish than the Jews” and “came close to trying out as a walk-on in the NFL.“

We’re exhausted already, and we haven’t even gotten to Biden’s lies in regard to his and Donald Trump’s presidencies.

For instance, Biden said during the debate that when he took office the “economy was flat on its back,” unemployment was “15%” and “there were no jobs.”

“These are 100%, solid-gold lies,” we said, and we backed up our statement.

Other Biden falsehoods during the debate include the whopper that he is the “only president this century, this decade, that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world” when in fact 13 U.S. service members were killed in action in Afghanistan during Biden’s bungled August 2021 pullout; that the U.S. Border Patrol union had “endorsed me, endorsed my position”; and that Trump “wants to get rid of Social Security. … He’s wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

Biden followed up the debate with an ABC interview in which he said “I’m the guy who put NATO together” and “I’m the guy that shut (Vladimir) Putin down,” both of which are such obvious fabrications that we don’t even need to provide the evidence to the contrary. And, as we pointed out yesterday, he lied about the lies he’d previously told about how economists did or didn’t endorse his economic plan.

Now would a decent man continue to stack lies on lies? Of course not.

Biden also has a nasty streak. Surely there are voters who recall him condescendingly telling New Hampshire teacher Frank Fahey while campaigning in 1987 that “I think I have a much higher IQ than you, I suspect.” All the man did was ask which law school Biden attended and where he placed in his class. And Biden might have been right: The teacher was gullible enough to endorse Biden in 2019 because – get this – he liked Biden’s honesty.

Four years later, it was Biden who led the “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks” during U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearing. Biden was earlier complicit in the smearing of Robert Bork, who was nominated for the Court but rejected by the Senate. Our former Investor’s Business Daily colleague, the late George Neumayr, wrote in 2020 that “Supreme Court nomination hearings have gone from serene to savage, thanks largely to Joe Biden.”

Biden’s shameful conduct was on display during the 2012 campaign, when he said Republicans were going to put black Americans “back in chains,” and again repeatedly over the years claiming that truck driver Curtis C. Dunn “drank his lunch” before the 1972 collision in which Biden’s wife Neilia and infant daughter Naomi were killed. The truth is “the state official who oversaw the investigation” and Dunn’s daughter “said that wasn’t true,” says the Washington Times.

Former Biden staffer Tara Reade might also have an opinion about how “good” Biden is. She accused Biden of sexual assault. In all, according to Business Insider, “eight women have alleged that Biden either touched them inappropriately or violated their personal space in ways that made them uncomfortable.”

We wonder, as well, what Biden’s daughter Ashley might say, if pressed, about her father. She wrote in her diary that she took “showers with my dad” and it was “probably not appropriate.”

The “good man” tale has also been exposed by credible charges that Biden profited from his office through his son Hunter’s business deals with foreign interests. Would a decent man pad his bank accounts in the millions through influence peddling?

We further ask if a good and decent man who promised to unite the country if elected president would later demonize roughly half the population with a speech that looked as if it had been stage-managed by Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl?

Joe Biden is not a good man and the many who have claimed he is know better. But in the same way, Biden’s mental and physical infirmities have been covered up, Scranton Joe’s nastiness has been concealed, as well. God help us if this unprincipled man who has served only himself and his family is reelected in November.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

Correction: This editorial had misspelled the name of Virginia, Democratic Rep. Don Beyer. It has been corrected.