Haifa, Rafah, Cannibals, Plane Crashes — It All Blurs Together in Joe Biden’s Mind

By itself, it’s not a huge deal if the president of the United States accidentally refers to the Israeli city of Haifa when he means the Palestinian city of Rafah.

But we’ve seen these sorts of glitches and gaffes from Biden before — referring to recent conversations with François Mitterrand, who died in 1996, and then describing a talk about the January 6 riot with former German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017, and so on. Just this week, President Biden told a bizarre and once again factually challenged story about an uncle who was lost during World War II and who may have died at the hands of cannibals:

Q    Mr. President, will you talk about the war memorial you were just at very briefly?  What did you see?  What did you hear?

THE PRESIDENT:  I wanted to see where my uncle, Ambrose J. Finnegan, was memorialized.  And there was a World War Two memorial built for those who lost their lives in World War Two.

And when D-Day occurred, the next day, on Monday, all four of my mother’s brothers went down and volunteered to join the military.  And four of them — three of them made it.  One was 4-F — couldn’t go.

And Ambrose Finnegan — we called him “Uncle Bosie” — he — he was shot down.  He was Army Air Corps before there was an Air Force.  He flew single-engine planes, reconnaissance flights over New Guinea.  He had volunteered because someone couldn’t make it.  He got shot down in an area where there were a lot of cannibals in New Guinea at the time. 

They never recovered his body.  But the government went back, when I went down there, and they checked and found some parts of the plane and the like.

As the AP gently notes, “the U.S. government’s record of missing service members does not attribute Finnegan’s death to hostile action or indicate cannibals were any factor.”

But beyond the fact that the president mixes up names and places, and remembers stories that aren’t true, when Biden goes out in front of the world and announces he’s telling Israel not to attack Hamas’s last major stronghold in the Gaza Strip . . . does that increase pressure on Hamas, or relieve pressure on Hamas? Do you think that makes the release of the hostages more likely, or less likely? And does that make the task before Israel more difficult, or easier?

Do you think this makes the Iranians more likely to strike at Israel, or less likely?