Although former Vice President Joe Biden is enjoying a lot of wind behind his sails since he announced his third presidential run, eventually his ship will hit the doldrums. A half-century in public office always turns up a few skeletons.
Many of them are already well-known. But there’s one from decades back that demonstrates more about the Biden character — or rather lack of it — than anything else, and could be his campaign’s death knell.
In late 1972, Biden had just been elected to represent Delaware in the U.S. Senate, and Christmas season was approaching. His first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden, drove off in search of the perfect family Christmas tree. She took their three children, sons Hunter and Beau, and daughter Naomi, with her.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
They never made it. Their car was struck by an oncoming truck, and both Neilia and Naomi were killed. Although police found the truck driver blameless, the event haunted him until his own death 27 years later.
The evidence indicated that Neilia, possibly distracted by the kids, drove into the path of the tractor-trailer, and it was her actions alone that led to the deaths.
The bare facts on their own made for a tragic story — a young wife and a toddler killed during a time of celebration. But 30 years later Biden decided to embellish the story further to tug at the voters’ heartstrings.
No longer was the truck driver, Curtis Dunn, blameless. According to Biden’s new and improved account, the lives of his wife and daughter were snuffed out by someone who “allegedly … drank his lunch.”
So why wait 30 years to play the drunk driver “sympathy card”? Simple: Biden waited until Dunn had himself died in 1999 and was unable to defend himself.
But his family was still around and demanded an apology, and they had support in the form of Delaware Superior Court Judge Jerome O. Herlihy, who oversaw the police investigation 36 years earlier as chief prosecutor.
“The rumor about alcohol being involved by either party, especially the truck driver (Dunn), is incorrect,” Herlihy said, according to the Newark Post Online.
Nevertheless, after Dunn’s death Biden’s false “drunk driver” story was picked up by major news outlets, including The New York Times and CBS News.
Eventually “Inside Edition” reached out to Dunn’s daughter, Pamela Hamill, and played a clip of Biden working the crowd for her.
“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,” Biden said in the clip.
It was the first Hamill had heard this, and she couldn’t believe it.
“I just burst into tears,” Hamill later said. “The story already is tragic enough, why did he have to sensationalize it by saying my father was drunk? My family is outraged.”
She and news outlets asked for an apology and an explanation. Biden eventually sent a handwritten note that expressed sympathy without admitting to anything.
It reads, in part, “All that I can say is I am sorry for all of us and please know that neither I or my sons feel any animosity whatsoever.”
Years later, Biden fabricated another story about his son Beau’s dying words, which was later reported by Politico.
This prompted the Washington Free Beacon’s Alex Griswold to ask, “Idk [I don’t know] why Joe Biden leaking and almost certainly twisting his son’s last words for political gain was never a bigger story. Who does that?”
The answer is simple. “Who does that” would be the same kind of person who dishonors another man with an outrageous claim to embellish a tragedy.
Newsmax TV’s John Cardillo observed that Democrats have “been going after families since Reagan,” adding, “They’ve become downright evil with Trump’s kids.”
Therefore, “Biden’s son, his dishonorable discharge for cocaine use, and his leaving his wife and kids for his brother’s widow are all fair game under the rules set by Democrats.”
If Republicans seek opposition research on the current Democratic presidential front-runner, they don’t have to look to his son. Biden’s own lack of character speaks volumes and provides plenty of ammunition.
In an attempt to distinguish himself from the current president, Biden told a room of Teamsters, “We Democrats and independents have to choose … truth over lies.”
Biden should be concerned about his own lies, which demonstrate that he’s morally corrupt and unfit to occupy the White House.