(IntegrityTimes.com) – During his trip to Pennsylvania, on Wednesday April 17, President Joe Biden spoke of his late uncle, 2nd Lt. Ambrose J. Finnegan Jr. twice. Both times he told the story of how Finnegan’s plane crashed near New Guinea commenting that his body was never recovered and that there “used to be a lot of cannibals” in that area.
While Biden is correct about his uncle’s remains never being recovered, and that there are well-documented accounts of the cannibalism practiced by some tribes in that region in the mid-20th century. However, official records tell a slightly different story about Finnegan’s death.
Biden told the tale of his uncle’s tragic end both to steelworkers in Pittsburgh and at a war memorial in Scranton as part of speech condemning former president Trump as being unworthy of being commander-in-chief of the United States. The incumbent president accused Trump of calling fallen soldiers losers and suckers in a reference to an often repeated, but never proven, story from the 2020 elections. Donald Trump has consistently denied saying the derogatory remarks about U.S. soldiers, but others have claimed he did.
On the Thursday after Biden’s speeches in Pennsylvania, press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, commented on the stories Biden told of 2nd Lt. Finnegan’s death. She stuck to the official story from the Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency which indicates that Finnegan’s plane went down the Pacific Ocean off the northern coast of New Guinea and that three men on board, including Biden’s uncles, were lost. There have never been any remains recovered associated with Finnegan, and there have been no indications they survived the crash or were cannibalized. Jean-Pierre put the focus on the president’s pride in his family’s military service, not the discrepancies in the details of Biden’s story.
President Biden has a long history of getting details wrong in his stories, whether by mistake or otherwise. He has said that he lost his son Beau Biden during the war in Iraq, but he actually died of brain cancer in 2013 at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1987, then-Senator Joe Biden claimed to have graduated in the top half of his class at Syracuse College of Law but said he must have misremembered when it came out that he graduated 76th out of a class of 85.
Some believe the president’s occasionally mangled and unbelievable stories are a sign of mental decline, while others say this is a consistent pattern throughout his long career in politics. Perhaps the best way to understand any public figure is to listen, then verify.
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