(RightWing.org) – “There is no present or future — only the past, happening over and over again — now.” — Eugene O’Neill, “A Moon for the Misbegotten.” Reader, please take note of the quotation marks and the fact that the name of the author and his work that the statement came from is included… the reason for this will become apparent shortly. Many are calling the cognitive abilities of President Joe Biden into question, something that Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has often (sometimes quite angrily) refuted from her podium.
The accusations sometimes take aim at his scatterbrained pronouncements, which pundits from the Right will use to imply a less-than-stellar intellect. His ability to… rewrite history (typically his own, not of America or the world) seems to know no bounds.
Padding the Truth
When a group of guys are sitting around a poker table and start reminiscing about their high school football days and one starts talking about the game that he caught four touchdown passes (when he only had three for the entire season) there’s no harm in it. However, when it comes to the academic achievements of the President of the United States (POTUS) who is arguably the most powerful individual on planet Earth, it becomes much more problematic.
Just recently, something of a unicorn popped up on the Internet — a meme that has its facts correct according to the generally Left-leaning fact-checking site, Snopes. A picture of then-Senator Biden with the then-president of the University of Scranton (PA) after he received an honorary degree and gave the undergraduate commencement speech in 1976 with the words “graduated 76th in a class of 85.” A statement that directly contradicts Biden’s own words when he previously claimed to have graduated in the top half of his class.
And he probably cheated. pic.twitter.com/tF0fjlCJF7
— Sue (@SueJ2024) April 19, 2024
These are some of the same issues that derailed Biden’s 1988 run for the Oval Office. An incident that was widely reported at the time centered on the future POTUS’s interaction with a person who asked about which law school he attended and his academic success.
The question seemed to have struck a nerve with Biden who angrily attacked the questioner, telling him “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do,” and then highlighted his academic prowess. He falsely claimed, amongst other things:
- He was the only person in his class to be on a full academic scholarship
- He finished in the top half of this class
- He graduated with three undergrad degrees
In a 1987 story on the matter, the Washington Post revealed that Biden had received a 50% needs-based scholarship and a position as a resident advisor to offset some of his room and board. They also called him out on a claim he made that he was “named the outstanding student” in the poli-sci department as an undergrad at the University of Delaware when he actually had a “C” average and finished 506/688 overall.
Now, back to our opening sentence which demonstrates the correct way to give credit for another person’s words. Biden suffered academic disciplinary reprisals for plagiarism for a freshman-year paper he submitted. These traits followed him into politics. While on his first presidential campaign trail, he was caught using the words of Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and the then-leader of the British Labour Party without ever telling anyone that they did not originate from the space between his ears.
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