[guest post by JVW]

President Joe Biden ventured out to our fiftieth state today to try his hand at consoling the families impacted by the terrible Maui fires earlier this month. As is his wont, he oafishly attempted to interject his own story in there, and it unsurprisingly fell flat:

Biden says "Jill and I have a little sense of what it's like to lose a home" and then tells the story of when lightning struck his house in 2004 and says "I almost lost my '67 corvette and my cat."

According to a report from the time, the lighting strike caused "a small fire… pic.twitter.com/V8IBfoZuEW

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 22, 2023

As we’ve mentioned before, Joe Biden is indeed a man whose life has been touched by tragedy, tragedy that none of us would ever want to endure. Yet as we have also discussed, he seems to feel entitled to augment that tragedy through exaggerations and fabrications, a weird personality disorder that makes him at once pathetic and aggravating. He took the horrible death of his first wife and infant daughter and spun it into a self-serving lie about a drunk trucker driving recklessly, and later turned the sad story of his oldest son’s death from cancer into an unsubstantiated tale of being caused by burn pit exposure, adding when he is at his worst repeated false claims that Beau Biden died in Iraq rather than at Walter Reed Hospital in Maryland. Now he is embellishing the story about a small house fire which was contained to one room, the kitchen, and put out within 20 minutes of the arrival of firefighters and comparing it to a raging blaze that ripped through important and historic parts of the island and has killed over 100 people with more than 800 still unaccounted for. He tries to deny the comparison by prefacing it with “I don’t want to compare difficulties,” and then of course delivers the “but” and proceeds to do exactly that, and he fibs about nearly losing his house when contemporary news reports indicate the fire wasn’t a particularly big deal.

As if that is not bad enough, the President makes light of the fire at his home by pointing out that he nearly lost his 1967 Corvette and his cat (after claiming to have “almost lost my wife” who no doubt scurried out of the home unharmed as soon as the fire started). From the video it appears that nobody laughs, but the President immediately transitions to “All kidding aside. . .” and carries on. There were undoubtedly people at that event who lost loved ones in the fire and had to sit through that demented stumblebum joking about the narrowly-missed tragedy of his mid-life crisis automobile. Because Joe Biden is a Democrat and because he is — brace yourself — the party’s best chance of holding on to the White House next year, the media is going to once again give him a pass on his blundering insensitivity and tall tales, because that’s what they do. Indeed, an Internet search at this moment suggests that only the usual suspects — Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Examiner — have deigned to point out how disgusting this part of his speech truly was. The Washington Times has the best headline: “Biden compares Maui wildfire devastation to that time lightning almost killed his cat.” Somehow I think the big boys at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, PBS, AP, Reuters, etc., would have a much different reaction had a Donald Trump said something this oafish and obnoxious.

What a complete asshole.

– JVW