#Tree of ‘Lies’ for Shameless Joe Biden: Devine

President Biden’s tall tale about going to the Tree of Life synagogue after the 2018 massacre is not the product of an ageing memory but symptomatic of a lifetime of lies.

It’s only now, with “Honest Joe” in the top job, that this character flaw is starting to be widely understood, as the latest polls show the president of moderation is losing the middle ground.

“I remember spending time at the, you know, going to the, you know, the Tree of Life synagogue, speaking with them,” Biden told Jewish leaders in a virtual address Thursday on the eve of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

But, as Post reporter Steven Nelson discovered when he phoned the Pittsburgh synagogue, Biden never visited the Tree of Life once in the three years since that anti-Semitic attack.

The dishonesty was vintage Biden, on two levels. First is the chutzpah of the untruth, which he expects will be protected from fact-checking by media favoritism and the innate politeness of Americans.

Second is that Biden told the lie to rev up the anti-white-supremacist campaign which has animated his presidency since day one. It is a peculiar crusade, based around demonizing all Trump supporters as somehow complicit in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which had nothing to do with white supremacy, anyway, and everything to do with an election some believed had been stolen.

It is peculiar also because, more than any politician in office today, Biden was aligned with old segregationist Democrat senators, such as former KKK recruiter Robert Byrd.

So Biden posing as a civil-rights activist is as authentic as his brilliant-white teeth and hair plugs, or his “devout” Catholicism while promoting abortion, or his claim to be the poorest man in Congress while he and his family live like kings.

Over his decades in politics, he has constructed a mythical persona full of tall tales of derring-do, exaggerations and outright lies about his accomplishments. He lied about nonexistent academic awards and scholarships and plagiarized speeches willy-nilly.

He pretended that he trained as a racial activist in black churches, claimed he was at the center of the civil-rights movement in Selma and Birmingham, and that he had been arrested in Soweto on his way to see Nelson Mandela in prison. None of it was true.

Each lie served to boost his ego, to place him as the shining superhero of every grandiose story.

If ever he felt his idealized self-image were challenged, he would fly into what can best be described as controlled narcissistic rage. We saw glimpses during the 2020 campaign when he called one man “fat” and challenged him to pushups.

Witnesses still talk about Biden’s unhinged reaction to perceived disrespect from billionaire financier Bill Ackman at a private VIP dinner in Las Vegas in 2017. He waved his fist inches from Ackman’s face, one witness recalls, and called him an “a–hole” after the billionaire cracked a joke about Biden’s loquaciousness, according to media reports at the time, though his campaign denied the story.

But this inner weirdness is the pattern of his life. It was captured in a video of Biden at a campaign stop in New Hampshire in 1987, when he angrily berated a man who asked how well he did at law school. “I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do,” said Biden, jabbing the air with his finger, then lying shamelessly about his academic record.

Even when caught out, he repeated the false tales. He seemed to have no shame, as if he had come to believe his own fantasies and had some psychogenic compulsion to share them.

The only time his confabulations tripped him up was when he plagiarized a speech from British Labour Party Leader Neil Kinnock and appropriated his life story.

The scandal forced him out of his 1988 presidential run, but it didn’t stop the lies. Previously he was protected from the worst consequences of his fabulism by the Obama administration, the collegiality of the Senate and media allies.

But now that he is president there is nowhere to hide. Now Americans who voted for Biden are realizing they were tricked into voting for a mirage: a man of empathy, competence and vast foreign policy expertise who would unite the country and heal the wounds of the dastardly Trump years. He would “restore the soul of America,” he told us.

Now they see that the economic recovery has stalled, black unemployment has soared in the latest jobs figures to 8.8 percent from 8.2 percent, inflation is eroding wages, and the border crisis continues unchecked.

A Zogby poll last week found that 20 percent of Biden voters already regret their vote, with young people and minorities the most disenchanted. Of Hispanics who voted for Biden, 33 percent rue their choice as do 25 percent of African Americans. 

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds Biden’s overall approval rating is down six points from June to 44 percent, with 57 percent of independents disapproving of his performance.

And that’s despite months of glowing hagiographies in the press about his dexterity with fireplaces and dog-whispering prowess.

But the honeymoon is over. The disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan lifted the veil and the bad news will haunt us for years.

Sinking WH’s green ‘no deal’

If Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin makes good on his threat to torpedo the Biden administration’s $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” package of green boondoggles, the president will have nothing to boast about at the Glasgow climate conference this fall. 

President Biden’s weakness in the polls means he needs a win on climate to salvage what’s left of his credibility with his base. That’s why we saw top Democrats cynically capitalize on the storms that saw people drown in basements in New York last week. It’s why Biden flew to Louisiana to claim he could stop hurricanes. 

But to score a win in Glasgow, he needs China to play ball. So John Kerry, Biden’s special envoy for climate change, spent two days jawboning with Chinese diplomats last week. 

But in another predictable foreign-policy humiliation, they sent him away, with Foreign Minister Wang Yi telling him, with a flea in his war“China-US cooperation on climate change cannot be divorced from the overall situation of China-US relations.” 

In other words, Biden must appease China, whether with trade concessions, or not investigating the origins of the Wuhan virus, or not protesting China’s persecution of Christians and Uyghurs, or whatever else President Xi Jinping wants. Just shut up and the Chinese will make meaningless commitments on climate that will give Biden a “victory”. They know Biden doesn’t care whether they genuinely plan to cut carbon-dioxide emissions. All he wants is the “perception,” just as he told Afghanistan’s president to lie about Taliban advances. China knows the game.