The definition of a psychotic is one who is delusional or has an impaired grip on reality. I fear that Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden may well fit that definition. Either that or he's simply mendacious.
For instance, how can anyone who has a grip on reality make the claim that under Obama there was never "a hint of scandal or a lie"? Yet that's the claim that Biden made at a recent campaign rally.
Now, I know this is Uncle Joe Biden we're talking about, and that everyone takes Joe's remarks with a chunk of salt, but still. Hasn't he heard of Fast and Furious, the IRS scandal, the VA scandal, the Benghazi scandal or any of the scandals surrounding the 2016 election involving illegalities perpetrated by members of the FBI and perhaps others in which his administration is at least hinted at having been implicated?
Hasn't Mr. Biden heard of Mr. Obama's promises that if you like your doctor you'll be able to keep your doctor or that Obamacare will bring the cost of insurance coverage down?
Politifact awarded Obama the “Lie of the Year” in 2013 for that howler, and former Attorney General Eric Holder received a contempt citation from the House Oversight Committee for the botched gun-running Operation Fast and Furious.
And what about the scandal surrounding President Obama's deal to trade five hardened terrorists detained at Guantanamo for Bowe Bergdahl, a soldier held by the Taliban for five years after deserting his post and defecting to the Taliban?
And what about the lies told by Obama administration officials about the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi that took the lives of four Americans? Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted in an email to her daughter that, contrary to the administration's public statements, the September 11, 2012 attack on the consulate was a “planned attack” by al-Qaeda and “not a protest.”
And maybe Mr. Biden has simply forgotten about the scandal surrounding the $400 million in cash secretly bestowed upon the Iranian mullahs on the same day the Iran nuclear deal was formally adopted by the Islamic Republic and four American prisoners released, or the reporting by Politico’s Josh Meyer which revealed the Obama administration’s simultaneous efforts to undermine investigations into a drug-trafficking ring in the United States run by Iran's proxy Hezbollah.
Maybe his memory has failed him, too, regarding the scandal which attached to the Obama administration's illegal surveillance of the press. Back in 2012, the Obama’s Department of Justice spied on the Associated Press, tapping around 20 different phone lines — including cell phone and home lines — that captured the private conversations of at least 100 staffers who worked for the organization.
Moreover, the Obama administration kept records of all outgoing calls “for both the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters” and the main line used by reporters in the House of Representatives, all of which was an egregious abuse of power.
The Justice Department had already spied on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, looking at his personal emails, and tracking his movements. Holder, by the way, shopped the case to three separate judges, until he found one who let him name Rosen as a co-conspirator in the crime of reporting news the administration didn't want publicized.
If Trump had done something like this the howls of media outrage would be deafening. As it was, the media meekly acquiesced since, after all, to protest too loudly would make the man they had apotheosized look tawdry and corrupt.
The reason Biden can say that there were no scandals or lies during his time on the Obama team is that scandals and lies only become such if the media keeps them relentlessly in the public eye.
But when the media works with an administration to keep the public in the dark about the corruption and shenanigans, as they did throughout the Obama years, then the stench of scandal quickly dissipates, and it becomes easy for someone like Uncle Joe, who seems to believe that the truth is whatever he says it is, to deny that things ever smelled bad at all.
