Snopes Gives Joe Biden Cover for Fake War Hero Story

Last week, former Vice President Joe Biden went beyond his usual stagnant pond of harmless gaffes to tell a story about an Afghanistan war hero who was far too modest to accept the medal of recognition that Biden was to pin to his chest. At the event, Biden told the crowd that, even though it was dangerous for him to travel to the war-torn nation, he wasn’t even slightly afraid.

“We can lose a vice president,” he said solemnly. “We can’t lose many more of these kids.”

“Not a joke,” he added, as if anyone thought it might have been.

Unfortunately for Joe, who gave the audience his “word as a Biden” that everything he’d said was the “God’s truth,” the Washington Post found that it was not. “Almost every detail in the story,” they reported, “appears to be incorrect.”

Damn, usually that kind of harsh criticism is saved for…well, Washington Post stories themselves. You KNOW Biden had to have screwed up royally if the Post was coming down on him like this.

Who would come to Joe’s rescue in his time of need? Why, none other than those fact-checkers extraordinaire over at Snopes. Taking a bit of a breather from their tireless work fact-checking the satirical Babylon Bee, Snopes turned their attention this week to salvaging what was left of Uncle Joe’s “word as a Biden.”

“To claim that Joe Biden’s story is false might give readers the misleading impression that the soldier at the center of it doesn’t exist. He does exist, and he did, in his grief, tell Biden he didn’t want the medal Biden pinned on him in 2011,” reported Snopes.

They decided to give Biden the benefit of the doubt, rating his story “mixed” instead of “false.” Which, of course, it was.

“Biden’s story is not ‘false,’ as was widely reported, because his underlying recollection of pinning a medal on a grieving soldier who did not want the medal is based on a real occurrence,” they wrote.

Hmm, well by that broad stroke, Trump’s recollection of seeing Muslims celebrating 9/11 in Jersey is not “false,” either, because everyone remembers Palestinians dancing in celebration of the Twin Towers coming down. Maybe it happened in the Middle East and not in New Jersey, but Trump’s “underlying recollection” is still “based on a real occurrence.”

Did Snopes award President Trump a “mixed” rating based on that generous interpretation? What do you think.

And they wonder why conservatives don’t take these fact-checking sites more seriously.