The Democrats’ front-runner (for now) has been busted in an important lie. Joe Biden has publicly told two different stories – diametrically opposed to each other – about the advice he purportedly offered when the Navy SEAL Team Six’s raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan was being discussed by President Obama’s National Security team. We can state with confidence that he is lying about his position on a matter of national security, with the only question being which version was the lie – the first or the second?

Photo credit: Ancho

Jerry Dunleavy of the Washington Examiner lays out the credibility-destroying problem and provides a convincing answer:

After initially saying that he opposed the operation and told President Barack Obama not to do it, the 2020 Democratic front-runner changed his account to say he hedged in front of other official but privately told Obama to go ahead.

Every other account of the decision-making process indicates that the former vice president's first version was true and his later accounts were not. In 2012, he said his advice was, 'Don’t go.' By 2015, he had settled on saying he'd privately told Obama to 'go.'

The former vice president’s most recent descriptions of his stance — when he morphed from vocal opponent of the raid, to private supporter of it — contradicts the public accounts of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, former CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Obama himself.

It is very hard to imagine that the four people contradicting his revised story have any reasosn to lie, so we are left with the conclusion that he simply found it advantageous to lie after the raid turned out to be a bragging point for Obama to bolster his credibility as a decisive foe of Islamist terror (even as he was pushing for the Iran nuclear deal that handed Iran billions in cash and delayed but did not end its acquisition of nuclear bombs).

This story is yet another nail in the coffin of Biden’s campaign. He simply cannot withstand the sort of close scrutiny a presidential candidate is subjected to. That’s why his previous runs at the presidency failed.  

The basic problem is that Biden is not smart enough yet loves to talk.  He says what he thinks will ingratiate hiself with the audience he faces. His gifts as a “press the flesh” retail campaigner – gregarious and somewhat charismatic – worked very well in the small state of Delaware, where every taxi driver I encountered in Wilmington (I had two multi-year clients there in my consulting practice) had met him and liked him.

But on a national scale, Biden’s already occupied the only office he was qualified for, the Vice Presidency. I firmly believe that he was chosen a Barack Obama’s running mate because he was no threat to the top of the ticket as a rival and offered the image of a veteran establishment figure to take some of the rawness off of a candidate who had served only part of one term as a senator before going for the Oval Office.   

There are signs accumulating that the Democrats’ power elite understand that Biden could not run an effective campaign against President Trump, his current large lead in the polls notwithstanding. Rush Limbaugh concurs with the prediction I made a month-and-a-half ago that Biden would not make it to the top of the ticket in 2020.  Yesterday, he told his millions of listeners:

 I think the bottom line here is that Biden is finished but doesn’t know it. And he may know it, by the way. He just hasn’t fallen over yet. But it’s coming. Whoever this is… It could be elements of the Obama Regime. It could be the Democrat National Committee. It could be a Democrat strategerist [sic] somewhere. It could be a Democrat consultant somewhere, could be people inside his own campaign.

Somewhere, there are serious questions and doubts about Biden beating Trump, and this is also how you know that whatever the polls say today about Biden beating Trump, they don’t believe it. 

It’s going to be a little sad watching Slow Joe decline and eventually pull out. It’s already pathetic to see him desperately trying to get his old boss Obama to endorse him, something that just will not happen.

Not that he doesn’t deserve all the grief he is going to be in for. His campaign kickoff spread the lie that President Trump endorsed the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, as “fine people,” and he will literally lie (as we have just seen) and pander with no limit. But watching a tired old man fail reminds us all of our own mortality.