Hardly a day passes anymore that President Joe Biden or members of his administration do not stand before the American people and lie through their teeth.
The latest lie to be exposed came Tuesday, when Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he advised Biden to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, and that withdrawing them “would lead inevitably to the collapse of the Afghan military forces and eventually, the Afghan government.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley said he told Biden the same thing.
The generals’ testimony flatly contradicts Biden’s claim in an August 19 interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News that none of his military advisors told him to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, or ever warned him that withdrawing those troops would trigger the collapse of the Afghan military and government. Here is how the exchange went:
STEPHANOPOULOS: So no one told — your military advisors did not tell you, ‘No, we should just keep 2,500 troops. It’s been a stable situation for the last several years. We can do that. We can continue to do that’?
BIDEN: No. No one said that to me that I can recall.
So either Biden was lying or he simply cannot remember what his top military advisors told him about one of the most important decisions of his presidency. Admittedly, the president is slipping in his old age and often seems confused, but the most straightforward explanation here is that he was deliberately lying to Stephanopoulos about what his generals advised.
During the Trump administration, the corporate press embraced the idea that Trump was always lying about everything, that he could not string together two sentences without inserting some falsehood or deception. Media coverage of Trump was premised on this assumption, even for serious matters like the development of the COVID-19 vaccines.
But Trump’s dishonesty now seems quaint compared to Biden’s. Under Biden, lies have become so commonplace and casual, they constitute a mode of governance for an administration that has proven to be hopelessly out of its depth on every major issue and profoundly incompetent in the face of every crisis. If the stakes were not so high, the abject lying — and the media’s willingness to go along with it — would be comical.
Often, the lies are obvious, like when Biden said last week that mounted Border Patrol agents in Del Rio, Texas, were “running over” Haitians migrants and “strapping” or whipping them with their reins, a false claim that was repeated over and over by the press and administration officials after photos of a horse patrol confronting illegal immigrants appeared on social media.
Biden on the lie that border patrol were using whips on illegal immigrants at the border:
"To see people treated like they did? Horses running them over? People being strapped? It's outrageous. I promise you, those people will pay." pic.twitter.com/Jx79KoYTy9
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) September 24, 2021
Before Biden even repeated this smear, along with a vile threat that the Border Patrol agents involved “will pay,” the whole story had been proven to be a complete fiction. The agents did not whip or strike anyone. In fact, they did exactly as they are trained to do, using their reins to control the horses and maintain a safe distance between horse and pedestrian.
The photographer who took the viral photos later confirmed he never saw the mounted Border Patrol agents strike anyone, and subsequent video footage of the incident should have settled the matter definitively. Instead of slandering and threatening the agents, the president should have come out and apologized to them profusely.
Sorting through my footage from the border. I was in the river during the viral incident between a Haitian migrant and mounted CBP agent. It's shaky – but here's what I captured. pic.twitter.com/fnvxSU83tO
— Sarah Blake Morgan (@StorytellerSBM) September 24, 2021
But Biden appears to be incapable of not lying all the time, even when his abject dishonesty is an insult to the intelligence of every American. It is simply pervasive.
Consider the idiotic lie Biden was peddling last week, that his $3.5 trillion climate change and welfare bill would actually cost zero dollars. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who is terrible at her job in part because she’s such a clumsy and unconvincing liar, went on to repeat the “zero dollars” false claim on Monday.
What all these lies obscure is rank incompetence on the part of the Biden administration. From the southwest border to Afghanistan to the pandemic response, every crisis that comes along has been bungled by this White House, and in every case the default response of Biden’s team is to lie about what is happening and why.
That is how you get hundreds of Americans left behind in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan after the Biden administration spent weeks claiming it would not leave until every American who wanted to leave was safely evacuated. Specifically, Biden said on August 18 that if there were still U.S. citizens in Afghanistan on the Aug. 31 deadline who wanted to leave, “We’re gonna stay to get them all out.”
We did not, and it seems clear in retrospect that Biden had no intention of leaving any U.S. troops in Afghanistan after Aug. 31, no matter how many Americans would be stranded behind enemy lines as a result.
What we can conclude from this pattern of deception is simply that Biden does not feel the need to give straight answers about any decision he makes or policy he enacts. He will not be honest about what his advisors tell him or about what he intends to do on any given issue.
Above all, Biden has made it clear, through an unrelenting fusillade of lies, that he does not consider himself to be the least bit accountable to the American people, does not think ordinary rules and norms apply to his administration, and does not think he owes anyone an honest word about anything that happens on his watch.
He has decided, that is, to govern by lies. The least we can do, at this point, is be honest about that.