Joe Biden was once considered the frontrunner in the race for the Democrats’ 2020 presidential nomination. But a series of gaffes and bizarre utterances from the former vice president have led some to question his fitness to serve as commander in chief — and according to one columnist, it seems like Biden’s blunders just keep adding up.
The Biden campaign was betting it all on South Carolina, but with just days left until the votes are tallied, “Biden is piling up one bizarre brain freeze after another,” writes Breitbart’s Joe Nolte.
Nolte went on in a column published Tuesday:
In less than two weeks, Biden has forgotten what office he’s running for, who was the attorney general while he was vice president, which Chinese leader he worked with on the Paris Climate Accord, and is just making up stories about being arrested in South Africa in 1989.
Biden’s latest blunders
The missteps didn’t stop there. During Tuesday night’s primary debate in South Carolina, Biden inexplicably claimed that the number of people who have been lost to gun violence over the last 13 years amounts to nearly half the total U.S. population.
“One hundred fifty million people have been killed since 2007 when Bernie voted to exempt the gun manufacturers from liability,” Biden said, according to Newsweek. “More than all the wars including Vietnam from that point on.”
Those words came on the heels of another gaffe in which the former vice president introduced himself as a Senate candidate and told dissatisfied voters to support “the other Biden.”
“My name is Joe Biden. I’m a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate. Look me over, if you like what you see, help out. If not, vote for the other Biden,” he said at a campaign event in South Carolina on Sunday, as Nolte reported.
The columnist also noted that Biden told a crowd last week that his late son Beau served as U.S. attorney general. (In fact, Beau was Delaware’s attorney general.)
The gaffe machine lives on
In another odd turn of events, Joe Biden has recently taken to claiming that he was arrested while attempting to visit then-imprisoned South African leader Nelson Mandela.
“This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid,” Biden said on Feb. 11, according to RealClearPolitics. “I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robben Island.”
Biden followed that story up with a claim that Mandela later hugged him for getting arrested during the supposed visit. But reports quickly pointed out that Biden had never mentioned being arrested before, and Andrew Young, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. from 1977 to 1979, has said he has no recollection of the events that Biden described.
“No, I was never arrested and I don’t think he was, either,” Young told The New York Times, adding, “I don’t think there was ever a situation where congressmen were arrested in South Africa.”
Looking forward
Between Biden’s frequent blunders and his poor performances in the first three primary races of the season, things aren’t looking good for the former vice president’s campaign. And according to Nolte, “South Carolina is it” for Joe if he wants to make it to the White House.
“If Biden wins South Carolina, he lives to fight another day,” he wrote Tuesday. “If Biden loses South Carolina, he’s finished.”
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