Remember Hillary’s ‘airport shoot-out’ story in Bosnia? Not to be outdone, Joe Biden concocted his own version of an emergency landing in Afghanistan.
When Joe Biden tells voters he understands the threat posed by Afghan extremists, he dramatically illustrates one reason why: His helicopter was “forced down” on “the superhighway of terror.” Actually, snow, not the enemy, persuaded the helicopter pilot to land and wait out a storm.
The Democratic vice presidential candidate has repeatedly left that part out, in an episode that Republicans hope will become an echo of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s errant tale during the primaries of landing in Bosnia under sniper fire.
Biden has made a number of questionable statements recently that, viewed in isolation, might not amount to much. But this is a man whose first presidential campaign collapsed 20 years ago after he told a story about coal miners in his family that he lifted without credit from a British politician.
In a recent speech in Virginia coal country, Biden seemed to embellish his background once again. He declared, “I am a hard coal miner,” which he’s not and never has been. His spokesman, David Wade, said Biden was joking.
And looking back on his 1972 Senate campaign, he told Pennsylvania delegates at the Democratic convention that people from his hometown of Scranton, Pa., piled in up to 10 buses and drove to Wilmington, Del., to show him support. “Literally,” he said, “there were hundreds of thousands of people.”
Oh yeah, then there was his adventure in Iraq:
“Let’s start telling the truth,” Biden said during a presidential primary debate sponsored by YouTube last year. “Number one, you take all the troops out – you better have helicopters ready to take those 3,000 civilians inside the Green Zone, where I have been seven times and shot at. You better make sure you have protection for them, or let them die.”
But when questioned about the episode afterward by the Hill newspaper, Biden backpedaled from his claim of being “shot at” and instead allowed: “I was near where a shot landed.”
The senior senator from Delaware went on to say that some sort of projectile “landed” outside a building in the Green Zone where he and another senator had spent the night during a visit in December 2005. The lawmakers were shaving in the morning when they felt the building shake, Biden said.
“No one got up and ran from the room-it wasn’t that kind of thing,” he told the Hill. “It’s not like I had someone holding a gun to my head.”
http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/09/30/unlike-clinton-biden-gets-pass-saying-shot-iraq/
That’s his story, and he’s sticking to it.
Biden has a John Kerry-like history of Walter Mitty recollections. Like the time he was at the Cambodian border. Or the time he drove his tank all the way to the spider hole where Saddam was hiding and pulled him out by the scruff of his filthy neck. Or the time he fought off a whole platoon of bad guys at (pick a location).
Democrats have a habit of inserting themselves into pseudo-combat/military/embellished situations when it suits them. Usually, they’re busy trying to exploit the fallen for disingenuous purposes, denigrating the troops as ‘murderers’, or labeling them as ‘pawns’.
This ‘me too’ crap on the part of lefties is just as pathetic as it is transparent.