Washington Post headline, March 21: “Biden’s stutter surges into the presidential campaign.”
There might be a special place in hell for the editor who put the tongue-twisting phrase “stutter surges” in this story about a speaking impairment, but the more pertinent matter was in the subhead that read, “Trump mocks and exaggerates the speech impediment. Biden embraces it as reflecting compassion.”
Now we know that this isn’t an informational article intended to address a peculiarity of the election season but yet another corny attempt to cast Donald Trump as a vicious bully and Joe Biden as a dewy-eyed guardian of goodwill (gag).
From the piece, authored by Matt Viser: “Donald Trump has mocked Biden in recent weeks by falsely claiming that the president is stuttering during his speeches, and he has parodied the purported stammer on occasion, but Biden has been relying on a longtime centerpiece of his personal and political biography, embracing it to sell himself as the candidate of compassion for the 2024 presidential rematch.”
Is the stutter real or not? It can’t be both “falsely” portrayed and only a “purported stammer” when Trump refers to it while simultaneously “a longtime centerpiece” of Biden’s biography that showcases his “compassion.” He either has one or he doesn’t.
But the contradiction crammed into a single sentence doesn’t matter to Viser because his point isn’t to make sense. It’s to make Biden’s alleged speech problem a strength for the president rather than a weakness exploited by his political opponent, who Viser doesn’t like.
More from the article: “It was after the State of the Union on March 7, when Biden attacked Trump in fiery terms, that Trump most recently introduced Biden’s stutter into the campaign. At a rally in Georgia, Trump asked sarcastically if Biden would ‘bring the country t-t-t-together.’ Biden never used that phrase in his speech, and in the seven instances he said the word ‘together,’ he did not stutter.”
The stutter never happened! He did not stutter! Biden is the silver-tongued wordsmith he’s always been! Stutter? What stutter?!
Viser: “Biden reacted by embracing the disability he battled to overcome as a child, one that he still works to subdue.”
Eureka! Now that Biden wants to be seen “reflecting compassion,” it’s real again!
To be fair, Viser is perhaps confused because it’s not clear whether the president truly suffers a speech impediment or if it’s another one of those gauzy fabrications Biden’s relayed for years to endear himself to whoever’s listening at the moment. He has repeatedly told audiences that he experienced a life-threatening house fire that never happened. He lies about receiving an appointment to the Naval Academy. He says he was a “professor” at the University of Pennsylvania, though he never taught a class.
He tells black people he “marched in the Civil Rights movement,” and he didn’t. He once gave his “word as a Biden” on the veracity of a tale he relays about a dangerous visit to Afghanistan as vice president — a story completely made up. He has said his tenderness for non-heterosexuals was instilled in him by his father after the two of them witnessed men kiss in public in the 1960s. It’s a lie. Let’s not forget that Biden enjoys occasionally tapping his inner sorrow to tell grieving Gold Star families that his own son died while serving in Iraq when, in reality, Beau Biden died after receiving world-class medical treatment for brain cancer in Maryland.
Not even rugs lie with such ease.
Maybe the stutter story is one of those rare personal details that Joe Biden has been honest about. If true, then it has to be true all the time, and not just when the legacy media wants to highlight the president’s “compassion.’
