What’s Eating Joe?

Ahead of a meeting between Prime Minister James Marape of Papua New Guinea and Chinese Communist Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Joe decided to accuse Papua of eating his uncle.

After a visit to Scranton Veterans Memorial Park, Joe Biden claimed that his uncle Ambrose J. Finnegan “flew single-engine planes, reconnaissance flights over New Guinea. He had volunteered because someone couldn’t make it. He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time.”

Amazingly, even for a Joe Biden tall tale, almost no part of that story is true. Ambrose, a 2nd lieutenant, was a passenger on an administrative flight when the plane’s engines failed and it went down in the water. He wasn’t a heroic volunteer, he was a passenger, and he wasn’t shot down, but died in an accident, and he wasn’t eaten by anybody except maybe a shark.

While Biden has made up a lot of family tragedies and war stories, this is the first one to offend an entire nation and alienate it just in time for the People’s Republic of China to swoop in.

“President Biden’s remarks may have been a slip of the tongue; however, my country does not deserve to be labeled as such,” Prime Minister James Marape objected.

There was cannibalism, Michael Kabuni, a lecturer in political science at the University of Papua New Guinea, admitted, but “taking it out of context, and implying that your [uncle] jumps out of the plane and somehow we think it’s a good meal is unacceptable.”

“They wouldn’t just eat any white men that fell from the sky.”

First, Biden claims that Papuans ate his uncle and a Papuan political science professor responds by implying that Joe’s uncle wasn’t worth eating. Cannibalism in the area was a rare ritual because a diet heavy in Biden family members would be hard to come by and unhealthy.

Eating people is one of the least healthy diets around which is why even few animals outside of the government prey on us full time. Cannibal tribes would eat great leaders or the mentally ill (or both) which might qualify Joe Biden to be eaten by cannibals, but not his uncle ‘Bosey’.

But what’s really eating Joe is a stolen valor problem. And a Kennedy problem.

Joe Biden repeatedly and falsely claims that his son Beau Biden died in Iraq when he actually died of cancer in America. The ‘Uncle Bosey’ story is part of a pattern of fake war stories.

“The superhighway of terror between Pakistan and Afghanistan where my helicopter was forced down. John McCain wants to know where bin Laden and the gates of Hell are? I can tell him where. That’s where Al Qaida is. That’s where bin Laden is,” Biden claimed in the 2008 campaign.

The chopper carrying Sen. Biden, Sen. John Kerry and Sen. Chuck Hagel landed in safe territory during a snowstorm. It remained there under heavy military protection before the Arizona National Guard’s 1st Battalion who traveled through the “bitter winds, freezing rain and snow for more than 15 hours” to escort him to Bagram Air Base. Which he would later abandon.

During the 2020 election bid, Biden once again falsely claimed that he risked his life traveling to Afghanistan. “I’ve been in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan 30 times. I’ve pinned medals, Silver Stars, on soldiers up in the Upper Konar Valley, in the middle of a firestorm.”

“They’re behind, it’s called a FOB, a forward operating base, behind these great big barriers on top of a mountain in a little cove in a godforsaken country,” Biden claimed. “A four-star general asked me, would I go up into the FOB. Everybody got concerned. A vice president going up in the middle of this. But we can lose a vice president. We can’t lose many more of these kids. Not a joke.”

Biden’s story of heroically traveling to pin a medal into a firestorm to pit a medal on a soldier was also false.

The actual story comes from the same trip at the helicopter “forced down” in the “superhighway of terror“ when Biden, along with Kerry and Hagel, visited a base and watched a medal ceremony for an actual hero. No general asked Biden to risk his life to pin a medal on a wounded soldier. Nor did Biden pin the medal on him. The base, known as Naray or Bostick, did not come under fire when Biden was there. Nor was traveling there in 2008 a serious risk.

In February 2008, when Biden visited Afghanistan, only one American soldier had been killed that entire month.

Biden visited Afghanistan at a time when he knew it was safe and used the trip to invent war stories for the election.

And then there was “Uncle Frank”.

According to Joe Biden at yet another event, this one at the Major Joseph R. “Beau” Biden III National Guard/Reserve Center, celebrating the military service of his son as a JAG in Iraq for 7 months, claimed that his father told him that “Uncle Frank fought in the Battle of the Bulge” and “won the Purple Heart”, but “never received it”. So Joe Biden came over with his dad to bring Uncle Frank a Purple Heart. Not only did the story never happen, because Frank was dead by then, but there had never been any record of a Purple Heart awarded to a Frank Biden.

Nor was there a Purple Heart awarded Ambrose Finnegan because he wasn’t shot down or captured, he was not on a combat flight, but traveling on an administrative flight.

When Joe Biden falsely claimed that he awarded a Purple Heart to his Uncle Frank, it reflected a real grudge that the military hadn’t provided him with some war heroes in the family.

Joe Biden makes up all sorts of stories, but there is a pattern to a lot of those stories.

Like a lot of Democrats with presidential aspirations, he wanted to be JFK. To do that, he built up claims of being Irish (the late Uncle Bosey was not only used to prop up the Bidens as war heroes but as Irish), of being a talented lawyer, a football player and a man who from an early age had met with world leaders. That’s not Joe Biden’s biography, but it is JFK’s biography.

Like the Kennedy family, Biden framed his family as a tragic clan. Beau became his Joe Patrick Jr, the promising golden child who could have changed the world had he not died in a war, whose death inspired him to run for office. Meanwhile, Joe Biden supplemented the narrative with other family war stories that never happened.to live out his fantasy of being JFK. How infuriating it must be for a man who believes he is JFK to be challenged by an actual Kennedy.

What’s eating Joe aren’t the cannibals of New Guinea, but that he isn’t a Kennedy.

“The Kennedys were, as a group, the people he patterned his life after,” Ted Kaufman, Biden’s former chief of staff, said. “Not just his political life, but his life.”

In Biden’s stories, he’s not an old man with a failing mind, he is JFK, flying into danger, inspired to change the country by the death of a loved one, burdened by tragedy, but rising to the occasion to inspire a nation. In New Guinea, they might not eat just any white men that fell from the sky. They might not eat a Biden, but even cannibals would have the taste to eat a Kennedy.

Joe Biden isn’t living his life, he’s cannibalizing the already eaten up Kennedy family legacy.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.

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