JOE BIDEN, THERE YOU GO AGAIN--LIAR LIAR

THIS IS WAY TOO GOOD TO MISS:

Truthless Joe

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, October 03, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Election '08: It's hard choosing the worst in last Thursday's vice presidential debate: Sen. Joe Biden's continual untruths, his certitude in delivering them, or the free pass he got all night long.

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In "The Prince of Darkness," his memoir of 50 years as a reporter in Washington, Robert Novak points out that while Jimmy Carter successfully ran for president by acting as "the anti-Washington, anti-government, anti-lawyer candidate telling audiences, 'I'll never lie to you' and setting post-Watergate standards of honesty," behind the smile Carter was actually "a habitual liar who modified the truth to suit his purposes."

But neither Carter nor Bill Clinton, whose twists and turns before a grand jury led to his impeachment, ever stared into the camera and spouted such a string of outright fabrications as if they were gospel truths the way Barack Obama's running mate did last week.

Thankfully, the blogosphere has been having a field day cataloguing Joe's whoppers. First, as InstaPundit's Michael Totten instantly noted after the debate, Biden — the great, seasoned foreign policy expert who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — falsely claimed France and the U.S. "kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon."

Of course, the debate's moderator, Gwen Ifill of PBS' "Washington Week," didn't call Biden on the gaffe; that might not be good for sales of her upcoming book, "The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama" (especially if there turns out not to be an Age of Obama).

There was also Biden's accusation that John McCain is soft on regulation, when in fact he tried to beef up regulations on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — an explanation for why he got so little campaign money from Fannie and Freddie over the years — under $22,000 — as opposed to the more than $126,000 Obama received in his short time in the Senate.

Sen. Biden falsely claimed that Obama didn't pledge to meet with Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; he falsely claimed Gov. Sarah Palin supported a windfall profits tax on oil companies; he said he's always been for clean coal in spite of his record of voting against it in the Senate.

Biden said we have to drill for more of our own oil, easily leading viewers to conclude he and Obama are in favor of more domestic drilling, but as the American Thinker blog's Rick Moran noted in a list of "Biden's Big Lies," "Biden has opposed offshore drilling and even compared offshore drilling to 'raping' the Outer Continental Shelf."

Gov. Palin called Biden on his claim that Gen. David McKiernan in Afghanistan said that the surge could not be applied in Afghanistan; in fact, McKiernan has said that some aspects of Gen. David Petraeus' Iraq strategy could be part of our war efforts in Afghanistan.

And Biden was wrong when he claimed that both McCain and Obama opposed troop funding; McCain simply opposed legislation with a withdrawal deadline.

The Delaware Democrat falsely claimed that McCain's health care plan raises taxes, failing to mention his proposal's offsetting tax credit. And he was untruthful in claiming that under an Obama Administration the middle class will "pay no more than they did under Ronald Reagan." Obama, in fact, says he will return income tax rates to the Clinton levels, which were significantly higher than those in effect after tax reform during the Reagan Administration.

National Review's Jim Geraghty noted Biden's claim that "we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spent on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan building that country" and concluded Biden was "off by 2,000%."

Geraghty also found that "Katie's Restaurant" in Wilmington, Del., where good old Joe invited anyone to have a beer with him, apparently hasn't been around for decades. Maybe the senator was too busy conferring with imaginary French liberators of Lebanon to visit his constituency.

But when tall tales are told with a straight face and mock conviction they are, unfortunately, believed by all too many — especially when the media helps peddle the disinformation.