President Biden is taking some heat over comments he made in a speech in Alaska on Monday to commemorate the 9/11 attacks. "Ground Zero in New York—I remember standing there the next day, and looking at the building," Biden said. "I felt like I was looking through the gates of hell, it looked so devastating because of the way—from where you could stand." The problem, as the Messenger and the New York Post reports, is that Biden wasn't at Ground Zero on Sept. 12, 2001. A White House official tells CNN that the president visited the site nine days after the attack as a senator.
It may have been a simple mistake, but the CNN story, doubling as a fact-checker, asserts that the claim fits into a pattern in which Biden has "repeatedly made false claims about his past." The piece ticks off nine examples, three from a single speech last month. (The Washington Post previously reported on how candidate Biden seemed to jumble up multiple events into one go-to war story.) Either way, Biden's critics were pouncing, including Ted Cruz, who tweeted a video of the 9/11 comments, adding, "Um...." Also not helping Biden: This incident followed a somewhat unusual news conference Sunday night in Vietnam.
In that presser, the 80-year-old Biden "spoke softly and appeared tired," writes Michael Shear of the New York Times, and he "rambled" as he discussed a John Wayne movie, "which left some in the audience deeply perplexed." Then, press chief Karine Jean-Pierre abruptly ended the press conference while the president was still answering questions, as this CNN video shows. Shear notes that Biden's critics pounced here as well, and he sums up: The "news conference underscored what survey after survey suggests is (Biden's) biggest political vulnerability: the perception that his age has eroded his ability to do the job." (Most Democrats appear to agree with that sentiment.)
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