Joe Biden’s gaffs…..

For more than four decades, Mr. Biden has embraced storytelling as a way of connecting with his audience, often emphasizing the truth of his account by adding, “Not a joke!” in the middle of a story. But Mr. Biden’s folksiness can veer into folklore, with dates that don’t quite add up and details that are exaggerated or wrong, the factual edges shaved off to make them more powerful for audiences.

Mr. Biden’s instances of exaggeration and falsehood fall far well short of those of his predecessor, who during four years in office delivered what the Washington Post fact checker called a “tsunami of untruths” and CNN described as a “staggering avalanche of daily wrongness.”

Former President Donald J. Trump lied constantly, not only about trivial details (like insisting it hadn’t rained during his inauguration when it clearly had) but also about consequential moments — misleading about the pandemic, perpetrating the “big lie” that Mr. Biden stole the 2020 election, and claiming falsely that the Capitol was not attacked by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.

Mr. Biden’s fictions are nowhere near that scale. But they are emblematic of how the president, over nearly five decades in public life, has been unable to break himself of the habit of spinning embellished narratives, sometimes only loosely based on the facts, to weave together his political identity. And they provide political ammunition for Republicans eager to tar him as too feeble to run for re-election in two years.

His stories have been repeatedly and publicly challenged, as far back as his 1987 campaign for president, when his attempts to adopt someone else’s life story as his own, and his false claims about his academic record, forced him to withdraw….

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Many presidents, of course, have stretched the truth — in ways big and small.

Bill Clinton lied under oath when he said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” Ronald Reagan insisted that he did not “trade weapons or anything else for hostages” during the Iran-contra investigation.

Like Mr. Biden, Mr. Reagan exaggerated his own actions, once saying that he had shot footage of Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II. He never did.

Mr. Biden’s critics have seized on his falsehoods to depict him as either a purposeful liar or a forgetful old man.

“When you lie about big things, you lie about small things,” said Greg Kelly, a host on the conservative network Newsmax, this year, “and always in a political sense, always in a way to try to get people to like him, and exaggerating along the way.”

The president has been delivering exaggerations at least as far back as his first presidential campaign….

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image….PBS