Cannibalism: A Teachable Moment

One bone of contention with the Biden administration, the left, and their regime media enablers is how, while claiming they want to speak truth to power, they won’t speak truth to the public. (What else would one expect from leftists engaged in war on the freedoms of speech and conscience?)

Presently, we are being asked to swallow that a president insinuating a relative was eaten by cannibals is normal political discourse in a robust republic leading the free world. Heck, didn’t President James Monroe reference his Revolutionary War uncle, “Monie,” who the redcoats captured and cooked somewhere in the swamps of Jersey?

Still, something more gnaws during the present cannibal contretemps: the left and its regime media aren’t even trying anymore to hide their mis- and disinformation campaigns on behalf of Mr. Biden. Despite the handful of besieged centrist and right-leaning information sites, the left’s information dominance has reached the apex where they are just going through the motions in perpetuating the deceit that the 81-year-old President Biden is cognitively capable of leading America and the free world not only now but, if reelected, for close to another half-decade.

To begin, let us serve up Mr. Biden’s recent remarks regarding his late uncle, 2nd Lt. Ambrose (“Bosie”) J. Finnegan Jr., who gave his life in the service of our nation during World War II.

First, in Scranton, Mr. Biden claimed: “He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time. They never recovered [Finnegan’s] body. But the government went back, when I went down there, and they checked and found some parts of the plane and the like.”

Later, in Pittsburgh, he elaborated: “He flew those single-engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones, and he got shot down in New Guinea. They never found the body because there used to be, there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea.”

Regrettably, President Biden’s tale of the tragic war-time loss of 2^nd Lt. Finnegan did not correspond to the known facts. Per the Associate Press:

According to the Pentagon’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Biden’s uncle, known by the family as “Bosie,” died on May 14, 1944, while a passenger on an Army Air Forces plane that, “for unknown reasons,” was forced to ditch in the Pacific Ocean off the northern coast of New Guinea. “Both engines failed at low altitude, and the aircraft’s nose hit the water hard,” the agency states in its listing of Finnegan. “Three men failed to emerge from the sinking wreck and were lost in the crash.”

For those who have even cursorily studied politics and/or Mr. Biden’s unsavory career-long penchant for prevarication and duplicity, what he was doing is obvious: not for the first time, he was exaggerating and exploiting his family’s tragedy to elicit sympathy and draw a distinction with his opponent to get votes from an audience in a key battleground swing state. Blue-collar workers in Pittsburgh and Scranton are committed to supporting our nation’s military personnel and serve in far greater numbers than their more affluent fellow citizens. Thus, the setting and the message make sense, except for the cannibalism part. (And, lest it be overlooked, how could Mr. Biden go “down there” and “some parts of the plane” be found when it crashed in the ocean?)

To honestly and accurately address how this “gaffe” entered into the messaging, one would have to admit some or all of the following: the proven plagiarist and serial dissembler’s increasing cognitive impairment has diminished his impulse control, which results in unnecessary lies and increasingly odd misstatements. And, yes, by admitting this, the larger truth is inescapable: Mr. Biden is not mentally competent to serve as a plant sitter, let alone President of the United States and leader of the free world.

Yet, the same Democrat party that believes changing the language will alter reality is quite capable of hiding and denying this truth. “Orange man bad,” etc. Thus, with all the alacrity of a weary grocery clerk responding to an alert to “clean up, aisle six,” the sycophantic regime media immediately hit the spin cycle in “reporting” Mr. Biden’s remarks as “apparent misstatement,” “off on the details,” “mischaracterizes,” “misstated key details,” “odd,” “embellishment,” or “unsubstantiated family lore.”

As is often the case, even as the regime media knows there is something to see here, CNN exemplified the regime media’s disgraceful “there’s nothing to see here” service to the left: “Biden’s accounting of his uncle’s death—and possible cannibalization—differs from the account published by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting agency.” Note, CNN’s tergiversation: it only allows how Mr. Biden’s patently disproven statement “differs” from the facts, including a “possible cannibalization,” and will not outright state it is false. Once more are the proffered goals of the “accountability” journalists skewered by the truth.

Such coverage abetted the administration in continuing to pretend that Mr. Biden is not cognitively impaired. He was just being “emotional” and salting the political fields by repeating a hoax that Mr. Trump called our troops “suckers and losers.”

Peppered with queries, Andrew Bates, the spokesman for the White House whose incompetence resulted in the deadly Afghanistan withdrawal, responded to Fox News Digital:

The President highlighted his uncle’s story as he made the case for honoring our ‘sacred commitment… to equip those we send to war and take care of them and their families when they come home,’ and as he reiterated that the last thing American veterans are is ‘suckers’ or ‘losers.’

Despite this and the regime media’s, by now rote, deflections to mask their preferred Democrat presidential candidate’s defects and deceits, many people did see something in Biden’s cannibalism statements that made them suitable political fodder. Of course, GOP and MAGA Twitter became a bon mot-fire of the vanities, with cyber fingers wiggling over the latest—and surely not the last—instance of Mr. Biden’s terminal case of foot-in-mouth disease. While such is political life in a divided America, there was a significant ramification regarding an issue of strategic import for our nation, one that had been simmering but was brought to a boiling point.

Not surprisingly, though family lore of cannibalism may have been suitable fare for the Biden dinner table, it gave one non-family member a serious case of heartburn—Papua New Guinea (“PNG”) Prime Minister James Marape. He understandably took umbrage at the suggestion his nation was rife with cannibals who had lots of fun at Finnegan’s Wake:

President Biden’s remarks may have been a slip of the tongue [well played, Mr. Prime Minister]; however, my country does not deserve to be labeled as such. World War II was not the doing of my people; however, they were needlessly dragged into a conflict that was not their doing… The remains of WWII lie scattered all over PNG, including the plane that carried President Biden’s uncle. Perhaps, given President Biden’s comments and the strong reaction from PNG and other parts of the world, it is time for the USA to find as many remains of World War II in PNG as possible, including those of servicemen who lost their lives like Ambrose Finnegan.

It is a particularly bad time to drive the PM crazy, as “Papua New Guinea has emerged as a potential strategic ally amid tensions between the U.S. and China.”

Notwithstanding yet another instance of a diplomatic job less than well done by Mr. Biden, Americans hunger for the rare instance of this administration and its regime media respecting the public enough to break a sweat lying to us. It is high time the self-professed “smart party” (they state without evidence) started proving it. Thus, in the interests of improving political discourse, I direct them to a dead white European male, James Joyce.

Per Britannica.com’s plot summary of his experimental novel Finnegans Wake:

[The book] blends the reality of life with a dream world… The beginning of the novel also introduces Tim Finnegan, the man named in the novel’s title. Finnegan, a construction worker, died in a workplace accident. At his wake, the strangeness of the story continues: Finnegan’s wife attempts to serve her husband’s corpse as a dish.

Now, this is the gristle the White House and its regime media should serve up in defense of Mr. Biden:

In relating his Uncle Bosie’s sacrifice in the service of our nation, President Biden, who was born to blue-collar parents in Scranton, was deftly referencing their fellow Irishman James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, alluding to its instance of cannibalism for maximal effect, as a subtle rebuke of those who doubt his cognitive capabilities—not that those critics have ever read it, let alone could understand it.

Eat that, haters!

But we are nibbling around the edges as we get to the meat of the matter: given their prevarications and party propaganda that would make even a Pravda apparatchik gag, will the Biden administration and its regime media cohorts ever receive their just desserts? It’s something to chew on…

An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional district from 2003-2012, and served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee. Not a lobbyist, he is a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars; and a Monday co-host of the “John Batchelor Radio Show,” among sundry media appearances.