Another 84-year-old who won't retire

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Body of Mississippi nursing student, 22, is found mutilated in a cemetery after surgeon father warned Nashville judge her life was in danger

Respected surgeon Lance Johansen pleaded with the judge not to let his daughter's boyfriend out of jail, or he would kill her.

Bricen Rivers, 23, was in jail for holding his longtime girlfriend Lauren Johnsen, 22, captive and viciously beating her while the were on vacation together in Nashville.

'I sat in the courtroom in Nashville and told the judge that if they let him out, he was going to kill her,' he said.

His words were prophetic, as Lauren's body was found mutilated and dumped in her own car on Wednesday, 

'He had assaulted her — this was probably the fifth or sixth time where they would get into a fight and he would beat her. We would get her away from him for a while, but he would find a way to weasel back in it.'

Dr Johansen drove from Biloxi, Mississippi, to make the impassioned plea to the court in Nashville after Rivers' arrest in December, and for a time, it worked.

But after rotting in jail for seven months, Rivers' lawyer convinced Judge Cheryl Blackburn [84] to lower his bail from $250,000 to $150,000 so he could get out.

He was supposed to go straight to a company that would install a GPS ankle monitor as a condition of his bail, but instead he disappeared.

'They let him out and didn't tell us, and didn't put the ankle monitor on him. They just let him walk out of jail,' Johansen told WLOX. 

The father had no idea Rivers was out of jail until he got a voicemail from Davidson County District Attorney's Office on Monday.

'This is Bailey calling from the district attorney's office in Nashville. Bricen Rivers was released from custody,' the message shared with WLOX began.

'He was supposed to report straight to a GPS company and be put on a GPS monitor and he was not to leave Davidson County. 

'But as soon as he was released, he did not report to that GPS monitoring company, and he has not been heard from. I wanted to make sure Lauren is safe.'

But Lauren was not safe.

Johansen desperately tried to call her, but she didn't answer, and he said texts he received from her number 'didn't really look like the way she talks'.

About 4pm on Tuesday, he got a notification that her Life360 tracker was turned off.

Then his younger daughter, who lived with Lauren, said she found the security camera smashed and the door sitting open. Lauren was nowhere to be found.

Johansen filed a missing persons report with the local Hattiesburg Police in Biloxi, but when he called the next morning, he claimed very little had been done.

'We assumed they were going to track the vehicle and try to find her, but they never did it until Wednesday at 3 pm when I insisted they find out where the car was,' he said.

Lauren's car pinged at the Wolf River Cemetery in an isolated part of Gulfport, Mississippi, and police rushed to the scene.

Rivers was in the car, but fled into the woods as soon as police showed up, leading them on an hours-long chase.

Johansen said as soon as he arrived at the scene he knew Lauren was dead. 

So I Googled the Judge, and uh oh:

Defense Attorneys Question the Competency of Judge Cheryl Blackburn

Multiple motions filed asking judge to remove herself from cases

By Steven Hale April 12, 2024

“Multiple” — that’s bad

Nashville defense attorneys have taken the extraordinary step of challenging the competency of longtime Criminal Court Judge Cheryl Blackburn. Nearly three years after the judge suffered a stroke at the courthouse, the legal filings bring into partial public view what had increasingly been the subject of hushed courthouse chatter. 

The Banner has learned of multiple motions related to Blackburn’s capacity that have been filed under seal. However, one motion filed publicly in a felony assault case on Wednesday shed some light on the doubts being raised about her ability to oversee serious criminal cases. 

Nashville defense attorney Kevin Kelly filed the motion seeking a postponement of his client’s trial so that he could research his client’s “constitutional rights to have this trial heard by a Judge who is competent to rule on issues related to this trial.” Kelly goes on to cite “this Honorable Court’s recent recusal and transfer in an unrelated case that was granted in response to a motion calling the Court’s competency into question.” 

Kelly told the Banner he couldn’t comment on the matter beyond saying that he has an obligation to advocate for his client. A hearing on his motion is scheduled for Friday morning. 

Former Public Defender Dawn Deaner said that motions to remove a judge are not made lightly and involve significant risk to attorneys and the people they represent.

“There is this underlying concern as a lawyer that if you file a motion that a judge might find offensive, that they will take it out on you, the lawyer, or they will take it out on your clients, or they will take it out on your future clients,” she said. 

In her view, some judges are very much seen as “kings and queens” of their courtroom.

“And it’s kind of like the old saying, ‘If you come at the king, you better not miss.’”

Blackburn got her undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University in 1969 and has been on the bench in Nashville since 1996.

The Mickster's lobbying efforts have finally paid off!

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erin go blech

Ireland’s being crushed by a tidal wave of immigrants, citizens are losing their jobs and housing, so the government has a solution:

Ireland has just appointed its first diversity commissar, a Nigerian who’s now (if she wasn’t before) on the taxpayer payroll.

The good people of Ireland have been gifted by their state a gift they never knew they needed: a brand-new diverse commissar equipped with brand-new government authority to lecture to them about their unmitigated deplorable racism or whatever so that they can learn to act right and stop being so racist that they allow Nigerian migrants to move to their country and earn a publicly-subsidized salary to tell them how irredeemably racist they are.

The Government has announced Dr Ebun Joseph as Special Rapporteur for the National Plan Against Racism (NAPAR) which was published over a year ago.

Dr Joseph is a Nigerian-Irish lecturer, who founded the first Black Studies University module in Ireland.

She will chair an Advisory Group on Racism and Racial Equality, which will facilitate evidence-based implementation of the action plan.

The National Plan Against Racism aims to make Ireland a place in which the impacts of racism are fully acknowledged and actively addressed.

The advisory group will assist in the ongoing implementation of the plan.

In her role as Special Rapporteur, Dr Joseph will monitor progress towards the objectives of the NAPAR.

The Special Rapporteur may also consider matters pertaining to racial equality more broadly, and will have the authority to request information and data from public bodies to support them in carrying out the role.

The hyphen-happy social engineers like to play fast and loose with national identity. Ebun is a Nigerian grew up in Nigeria and moved to Ireland in 2002 at the age of 32.

Via Wikipedia (emphasis added):

She was born Ebun Joseph Arogundade in Benin City, Nigeria in 1970 to Joseph and Grace Arogundade. She has six siblings. Her father Chief Arogundade from Okpe was a politician, and a former commissioner for education and finance. She has two sons, and lives in Dublin. She holds both Nigerian and Irish citizenship…

Ebun Joseph first trained as a microbiologist at the University of Benin. She went on to work as the Administrative Secretary for the Nigerian Britain Association before emigrating to Ireland in 2002.

While there are many bitter ironies about the Social Justice™ ideologues conquering what the British Empire with its vast armies and armada tried and failed to conquer for centuries, perhaps the most notable of which is that Ireland, alone among Western European nations, has no colonial legacy whatsoever and, in fact, was subjugated by the British itself for all those years, from whence myriad Irish fight songs have emerged.


Yet, somehow, Ireland’s liberal media — which is just as bad and perhaps worse than America’s — has managed to turn the island nation’s unending suffering and centuries of subjugated status into a history of itself inflicting white supremacy and oppression on others.

Via The Irish Times, “Ireland has yet to come to terms with its imperial past” (emphasis added):

Ireland was England’s first colony. We lived as part of the English, and then British, Empire for over 700 years. The Normans first conquered Ireland in 1169 and aside from a brief decade of independence during the 1640s Ireland formed an integral part of the English imperial system, until 1922 and the foundation of modern state. As well as being colonised the Irish operated as active colonists in the empires of Britain and other European powers…

Over these centuries, Ireland also served as laboratory both for imperial rule and for resistance to that rule. Structures, policies and ethnocentric ideologies were first formulated in colonial Ireland and later transferred to other parts of the British empire. This included modes and structures of governance; policies and practices associated with Anglicisation, especially the promotion of English culture, language, religion, and education; the law, particularly as it related to the use of land and other natural resources; and, finally, knowledge collection.

And this is fun: she actually references the death of George Floyd as the catalyst for her new country’s awakening:

He fought with Alexander; Scipio Africanus; and Uncle Frank. He fought cannibals with Uncle Ambrose, and he died alongside Beau in the sands of Iraq

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Speaking to military veterans and their families, July 4th, 2022:

"And by the way, I've been all over the world with you. I've been in and out of battles"

No joke.

I’ve read that the real soldiers respect just one medal: the Combat Infantry Badge. I never served, so I don’t know whether that’s true, but I do know that Joe Biden is a disgusting, horrible man for trying to claim that distinction.

U.S. Army Combat Infantryman Badge

TypeSpecial Skill Group 1 BadgeAwarded forPerforming duties while personally present and under fire while serving in an assigned infantry or Special Forces capacity, in a unit of brigade, regimental, or smaller size, engaged in active ground combat

More on Cloward-Pliven

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I found this article interesting; you may not, so feel free to jump off at any time. I don’t agree with some of the author’s assertions: I’d argue that NYC’s overloaded welfare system was A cause of that city’s bankruptcy, not the only one, but that’s a minor point. Note that, writing in 2005, he accurately predicted the 2016 election fraud.

they don’t look like rabid communists but then, most don’t

The Cloward-Piven Strategy By Richard Poe DiscoverTheNetworks.org - 2005

First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the Cloward-Piven Strategy seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue an African American man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called "crisis strategy" or "Cloward-Piven Strategy," as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when "the rest of society is afraid of them," Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would "the rest of society" accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven's early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. "Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one.

The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare -- about 8 million, at the time -- probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a "massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls." Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be "a profound financial and political crisis" that would unleash "powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level."

Their article called for "cadres of aggressive organizers" to use "demonstrations to create a climate of militancy." Intimidated by threats of black violence, politicians would appeal to the federal government for help. Carefully orchestrated media campaigns, carried out by friendly, leftwing journalists, would float the idea of "a federal program of income redistribution," in theform of a guaranteed living income for all -- working and non-working people alike. Local officials would clutch at this idea like drowning men to a lifeline. They would apply pressure on Washington to implement it. With every major city erupting into chaos, Washington would have to act.

This was an example of what are commonly called Trojan Horse movements -- mass movements whose outward purpose seems to be providing material help to the downtrodden, but whose real objective is to draft poor people into service as revolutionary foot soldiers; to mobilize poor people en masse to overwhelm government agencies with a flood of demands beyond the capacity of those agencies to meet. The flood of demands was calculated to break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears into gridlock, and bring the system crashing down. Fear, turmoil, violence and economic collapse would accompany such a breakdown -- providing perfect conditions for fostering radical change. That was the theory.

Cloward and Piven recruited a militant black organizer named George Wiley to lead their new movement. In the summer of 1967, Wiley founded the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). His tactics closely followed the recommendations set out in Cloward and Piven's article. His followers invaded welfare offices across the United States -- often violently -- bullying social workers and loudly demanding every penny to which the law "entitled" them. By 1969, NWRO claimed a dues-paying membership of 22,500 families, with 523 chapters across the nation.

Regarding Wiley's tactics, The New York Times commented on September 27, 1970, "There have been sit-ins in legislative chambers, including a United States Senate committee hearing, mass demonstrations of several thousand welfare recipients, school boycotts, picket lines, mounted police, tear gas, arrests - and, on occasion, rock-throwing, smashed glass doors, overturned desks, scattered papers and ripped-out phones."

These methods proved effective. "The flooding succeeded beyond Wiley's wildest dreams," writes Sol Stern in the City Journal. "From 1965 to 1974, the number of single-parent households on welfare soared from 4.3 million to 10.8 million, despite mostly flush economic times. By the early 1970s, one person was on the welfare rolls in New York City for every two working in the city's private economy."

As a direct result of its massive welfare spending, New York City was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1975. The entire state of New York nearly went down with it. The Cloward-Piven strategy had proved its effectiveness.

The Cloward-Piven strategy depended on surprise. Once society recovered from the initial shock, the backlash began. New York's welfare crisis horrified America, giving rise to a reform movement which culminated in "the end of welfare as we know it" -- the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed time limits on federal welfare, along with strict eligibility and work requirements. Both Cloward and Piven attended the White House signing of the bill as guests of President Clinton.

Most Americans to this day have never heard of Cloward and Piven. But New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attempted to expose them in the late 1990s. As his drive for welfare reform gained momentum, Giuliani accused the militant scholars by name, citing their 1966 manifesto as evidence that they had engaged in deliberate economic sabotage. "This wasn't an accident," Giuliani charged in a 1997 speech. "It wasn't an atmospheric thing, it wasn't supernatural. This is the result of policies and programs designed to have the maximum number of people get on welfare."

Cloward and Piven never again revealed their intentions as candidly as they had in their 1966 article. Even so, their activism in subsequent years continued to rely on the tactic of overloading the system. When the public caught on to their welfare scheme, Cloward and Piven simply moved on, applying pressure to other sectors of the bureaucracy, wherever they detected weakness.

In 1982, partisans of the Cloward-Piven strategy founded a new "voting rights movement," which purported to take up the unfinished work of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like ACORN, the organization that spear-headed this campaign, the new "voting rights" movement was led by veterans of George Wiley's welfare rights crusade. Its flagship organizations were Project Vote and Human SERVE, both founded in 1982. Project Vote is an ACORN front group, launched by former NWRO organizer and ACORN co-founder Zach Polett. Human SERVE was founded by Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, along with a former NWRO organizer named Hulbert James.

All three of these organizations -- ACORN, Project Vote and Human SERVE -- set to work lobbying energetically for the so-called Motor-Voter law, which Bill Clinton ultimately signed in 1993. The Motor-Voter bill is largely responsible for swamping the voter rolls with "dead wood" -- invalid registrations signed in the name of deceased, ineligible or non-existent people -- thus opening the door to the unprecedented levels of voter fraud and "voter disenfranchisement" claims that followed in subsequent elections. The new "voting rights" coalition combines mass voter registration drives -- typically featuring high levels of fraud -- with systematic intimidation of election officials in the form of frivolous lawsuits, unfounded charges of "racism" and "disenfranchisement," and "direct action" (street protests, violent or otherwise). Just as they swamped America's welfare offices in the 1960s, Cloward-Piven devotees now seek to overwhelm the nation's understaffed and poorly policed electoral system.

Their tactics set the stage for the Florida recount crisis of 2000, and have introduced a level of fear, tension and foreboding to U.S. elections heretofore encountered mainly in Third World countries. Both the Living Wage and Voting Rights movements depend heavily on financial support from George Soros's Open Society Institute and his Shadow Party, through whose support the Cloward-Piven strategy continues to provide a blueprint for some of the Left's most ambitious campaigns.

Cloward-Pliven Motor Voter Bill signing:

Another front in the war against America. But at least it's not #Never Trump, so Quigley Republicans are okay with it

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The latest public-subsidy scam: Joe Biden’s expansion of free ObamaCare policies

By Post Editorial Board

It’s the story of every government subsidy: Offer folks handouts if they meet certain requirements, and suddenly a lot of people . . . meet the requirements.

Cover the full cost of something — especially it’s something pricey, like health insurance — and the number zooms off the charts.

That’s what’s happening in the case ObamaCare subsidies President Biden and fellow Democrats generously expanded, with those getting handouts actually exceeding the number entitled to them, a new report from the Paragon Health Institute found.

The improper claims are costing American taxpayers an estimated $15 billion to $26 billion a year, prompting House Republicans to demand a review by the Health and Human Services inspector general and the Government Accountability office to determine “the breadth of improper enrollment and its underlying causes.”

Legislation passed by President Biden and fellow Democrats “resulted in tens of billions of additional taxpayer dollars being spent to prop up ObamaCare plans by increasing subsidies given to insurance companies far above those originally authorized by Congress,” their letters to HHS and GOA officials stated.

That includes expanded eligibility for totally free ObamaCare policies to people making up to 150 percent of the federal poverty level — an incentive, Paragon researchers found, that’s spurred as many as 5 million people to “improperly” claim income below that threshold.

To make matters worse, Team Biden has eliminated “program integrity controls,” which “appears to have created both the incentive and opportunity for individuals and brokers to misstate enrollees’ income.”

The result: Some states are now reporting “hundreds of thousands, and, in one case, millions more individuals enrolled in these plans than are reasonably likely to be eligible.”

“More than half of all enrollees in the federal exchange” claim incomes between 100% and 150% of the poverty level, enabling them to qualify.

That’s “notably higher than the historical average of roughly 40% for these plans.

The fraud “appears to be a significant problem in nearly half” the states, the researchers found, though it’s “much more severe” in states that declined to adopt ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion and in those that use the federal exchange (HealthCare.gov).

HealthCare.gov states report 8.7 million signups, even though only 5.1 million people are “likely eligible.”

Ironically, this fraud’s mainly in red states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah. (In states like New York and California, the fraudsters likely target generous Medicaid programs instead.)

I’ll add this: besides bankrupting our healthcare system, this, like other subsidy and free cash programs, acts as a disincentive to work. I posted last week on a Vermont restauranteur who offered a local woman $180 a week to work as a hostess 10 hours a week. She wanted the job, she’d explained to the owner, but it would cause her to lose her $220 per week VT housing subsidy, so that, in effect, she’d be paying $40 a week for the privilege of working. Some of us would do that; most won’t.

From behind the wall

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2019

A conversation I’ve been engaged in with Burning Madoff inspired me to turn off the Java function in my Safari browser and access the locked, 2019 New York Magazine article by Olivia Nuzzi on Biden’s then-faltering campaign. It’s far more generous towards the senile old crook than her current article is, (“The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden”)and kinda-sorta defends his age and memory, but it stands out, to me, because there were few other, if any, mainstream media reporters willing to write on the subject: *

VISION 2020 OCT. 27, 2019

The Zombie Campaign

Joe Biden is the least formidable front-runner ever. Will it matter?

By Olivia Nuzzi, New York’s Washington correspondent

Inevitably, he arrives late, by SUV or van. The former vice-president is thin and, yes, he’s old. He dresses neatly and always in blue. Staff envelop him. There’s the body man, the advance man, the videographer, the photographer, the digital director, the traveling chief of staff, the traveling press secretary, the local press secretary, the adviser, the other adviser, the adviser’s adviser, the surrogate, the other surrogate, and the bodyguard.

The looming presence of the last guy, Jim, is especially important for optics. Jim is tall and official-looking. He greets the world chest-first, his hands resting in a dignified clasp, his expression even, his mouth unmoving. Most people assume that he’s a Secret Service agent. Which he was.

But ex-VPs don’t get security for life the way ex-presidents do. Most people don’t know that, not even the politically savvy types who attend these sorts of things. And that’s all for the best, because Jim — or whatever local guy they’ve got filling in for him in Iowa or New Hampshire or Nevada or wherever else — is a necessary component of the vibe they’re trying to generate here, the Big Presidential Energy, if you will, that powers this production.

>>>>

But it’s not just his age itself. It’s his tendency to misspeak, his inartful debating style, and — most of all — his status as a creature from another time in the Democratic Party, when the politics of race and crime and gender were unrecognizably different. It’s not just that the Joe Biden of yesteryear sometimes peeks out from behind the No. 1 Obama Stan costume. It’s that the Joe Biden of today is expected to hold his former self accountable to the new standards set by a culture that’s prepared to reject him. And though he’s the party Establishment’s obvious exemplar, he can’t seem to raise any money — spending more in the last quarter than he brought in and moving into the homestretch with less than $9 million in the bank (roughly a third of what Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders has on hand). For political reporters, marveling every day at just how well this isn’t going, watching Biden can feel like being at the rodeo. You’re there because on some level you know you might see someone get killed.

>>>

Many of them treat Biden’s talking as yet another symptom of his age, but Biden has always been like this. “His major defect is that he goes on and on and on,” Orrin Hatch told the Washington Post in 1986, when Biden was 43. To say he overcame his childhood stutter would be a bad joke, like one of those I BEAT ANOREXIA T-shirts they sell on the Jersey boardwalk in size XXXL.

In Des Moines, in August, he told a crowd, “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” Realizing what he’d done, he tried to correct himself. “Wealthy kids,” he said, “black kids, Asian kids. No, I really mean it, but think how we think about it.” Two weeks later, in Keene, New Hampshire, he said, “I love this place. Look, what’s not to like about Vermont in terms of the beauty of it? And what a neat town. This is sort of a scenic, beautiful town.” (When he returned to New Hampshire the following month, a protester held a sign that read WELCOME TO VERMONT, JOE.) And so on.

>>>

And then there’s Hunter Biden himself, who was going to become an issue one way or another. The 49-year-old son of privilege and tragedy, he has had struggles with addiction and run-ins with the law that have been well-documented. The campaign did its best to control the subject, cooperating with a tell-all interview over the summer in which Hunter candidly discussed his drug use and his relationship with his brother’s widow. This is sometimes how flacks think they’ll get ahead of a story: You neuter the shock value by delivering the shock yourself. But when your son is a central character in an impeachment saga likely to preoccupy all of Washington and political news for six months, it’s a hard thing to get ahead of, especially when you don’t really seem to want to engage.

“It’s sort of bewildering,” Axelrod says. “I guess I understand it from a familial, psychological sense. It would just be so much better if he stated the obvious: Even Hunter has said he exercised poor judgment. He won’t even say what his kid said. It’s an obvious question as to why the rules that he’s going to apply in the future didn’t apply in the past. All this was foreseeable … You can’t say, ‘He did nothing wrong,’ and, ‘He’ll never do it again.’ Those things don’t go together. Biden can be stubborn. I think his stubbornness is showing here.” All of that said, Axelrod added, “what Trump is doing is loathsome and outrageous because there’s no evidence that Biden did anything wrong or that Hunter did anything wrong.”

[How’d that turn out, David?]

>>>>

(FWIW) Biden was doing this for years: the use of personal tragedy and manipulation of details to meet specific circumstances; we’ve seen it repeatedly over the past four years:

In September, somebody had the bright idea to stage an afternoon event under the open sky at the Indian Creek Nature Center in sunny Cedar Rapids. It was the day after news of the whistle-blower broke, but Biden stuck to the event’s topic, climate change, addressing all the usual themes. Then faces began turning upward to the birds overhead. Somebody from Showtime’s The Circus told me the birds were bald eagles, but at the time I thought they looked like hawks, which, I guess, is a sort of glass-half-empty or -half-full dilemma. Eventually, word of the alleged bald eagles made its way to Biden, and with a look of optimism, he turned his face to the sky. He grew emotional. He said that at the Lake House, Beau used to sit by the water and watch the bald eagles fly overhead. The night Beau died, in 2015, Biden said he watched an eagle take off from the lake, circle in the sky, and then fly away. He hadn’t seen another bald eagle since that night, he said, until now. Looking at the bird, he said, “Maybe that’s my Beau.”

Biden wrote a book about his grief, and about his son, called Promise Me, Dad. Therein, he tells a similar story, but with a different bird. That night, he wrote, “Jill spotted a white egret at the far edge of the water.” She told her husband that, as he lay dying, she whispered to Beau to go to the dock, “his happy place,” with his brother. “We watched the egret for twenty minutes, until it finally took flight,” Biden wrote. “The two of us sat in silence as the egret circled overhead repeatedly, slowly gaining altitude, until it finally headed away to the south, beneath the clouds, and gradually disappeared from sight. ‘It’s a sign from God,’ Jill said. ‘Beau being at the lake one last time, and heading for heaven.’ ”

*Typical of the coverage of the man back then was this piece by PBS, that doesn’t touch on his memory loss, and excuses his lies on, naturally, Trump.

Have Trump’s serial lies lowered the bar for Biden’s serial gaffes?

Joe Biden has long been adept at talking with a foot in his mouth, so perhaps it's no surprise that lately, on the stump, he has overdosed on whoppers.

….. But Biden’s piece de resistance (thus far) happened on Aug. 21, in a New Hampshire meeting hall, when he recalled how he had journeyed to Afghanistan and pinned a medal on a Navy captain who had rappelled down a ravine to fetch the body of comrade killed in combat. The Navy captain had risen back up the ravine, carrying the body on his back. The captain said he didn’t deserve the medal, telling Biden: “Do not pin it on me, sir!” Recalling this story, Biden told his New Hampshire audience: “This is the God’s honest truth. My word as a Biden.”

Well, some fact-checking reporters scrutinized “God’s honest truth,” and here’s what they found: “(A)lmost every detail in the story appears to be incorrect. Based on interviews with more than a dozen U.S. troops, their commanders and Biden campaign officials, it appears as though the former vice president has jumbled elements of at least three actual events into one story of bravery, compassion and regret that never happened … In the space of three minutes, Biden got the time period, the location, the heroic act, the type of medal, the military branch and the rank of the recipient wrong, as well as his own role in the ceremony.”

Biden has long told variations of this story to a number of audiences. Sometimes it’s a Navy captain (according to military records, that character is fictitious), sometimes it’s an Army captain (according to military records, ditto), and sometimes the heroic action took place in Iraq, not Afghanistan. Sometimes the dead soldier was pulled from a ravine, sometimes from a Humvee.

(No, that wasn’t his uncle Ambrose, who was eaten by cannibals in New Guinea, and it wasn’t his son Beau, who turned down the medal after he’;d died in that burning Humvee in Iraq, or maybe Afghanistan — who can remember? — it was Uncle Frank, or it was in an early rendition, who died 1999 before his prevaricating nephew became vice president )

Hence the conundrum for Democrats: Has Trump — with his documented 12,000 lies — lowered the bar so that Biden’s falsehoods should be deemed no big deal? That Biden should get a pass because his fictional forays are far more benign? (Last week, Trump lied that China was begging to restart trade talks with Tariff Man, that China had reached out to him with “high-level calls.” Turns out, Trump made that up. There were no calls.) Biden himself has insisted that he should get a pass; last December he said: “I am a gaffe machine, but my God, what a wonderful thing compared to a guy who can’t tell the truth.”

But perhaps lowering the bar for Biden is not the answer. Perhaps Democrats should insist on a higher standard of veracity from their 2020 nominee. Rest assured that if Biden faces off with Trump, some members of the mainstream press, in the quest for “balance,” will fudge the contrast and find a false equivalence between Biden’s gaffes and Trump’s lies. I’m not arguing that Democrats should summarily reject Biden; but, with Biden as the nominee, his foot-in-mouth disease is a potential risk.

Unless it’s not. Some Democratic primary voters in South Carolina, interviewed recently, don’t care a whit. One woman said his flubs were fine because “his heart is in the right place and that’s what we need right now.” One guy, asked about Biden’s errors, said, “So what? I do too. He’s human. It makes him real.” Another woman said, “That’s what makes him likable.” Another guy said, “The gaffes don’t matter because we all mess up, we’re all human.”

The lesson, perhaps, is that the veracity factor is only one of many. If voters like a politician, they’ll give that person plenty of slack. Trump’s cultists prove the point in the extreme, but it’s not a new phenomenon. Voters elected Ronald Reagan twice despite his frequent flights of imagination. (Random example: Reagan said that, as a member of the U.S. Army film corps, that he personally shot footage of Nazi concentration camps as they were being liberated. In truth, he never left Hollywood.) Context is everything. If Biden can convince enough people that he’s a comfortable soft landing after four dire years of Trump turbulence, his blarney won’t be a deal-breaker.