Biden rejects report he flubbed details in anecdote about war heroes

[brooklynite]

Politico

Former Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday rebuffed a news report that he has recently misrepresented an anecdote on the campaign trail about giving awards for valor to members of the military, possibly conflating three separate real life events.

Though Biden said he hadn’t seen the Washington Post article, he told a reporter for the The Post and Courier after a campaign event in South Carolina that he stood by his retellings of meeting with heroes of the Afghanistan war over the last decade.

According to The Post, Biden has told a shifting and increasingly dramatic account of a trip to Afghanistan while vice president to award a medal to a heroic soldier who initially resisted the honor out of guilt. The former vice president most recently told the story at a campaign event in New Hampshire last Friday.

But The Post found after conducting “interviews with more than a dozen U.S. troops, their commanders and Biden campaign officials, it appears as though the former vice president has jumbled elements of at least three actual events into one story of bravery, compassion and regret that never happened.”

[bluewater]

1. oh boy... where is the Biden Campaign staff when Joe needs them?

It would be better to just admit the mistake and move on, as damaging as that is.

Denying it was a mistake just amplifies the bad optics and ensures more media coverage.

The press does not like being called liars, and as the old saying goes, it does not pay to publicly argue with someone that buys ink by the barrel. (an old newspaper heyday adage)

[mr_lebowski]

26. I tend to agree ... doubling down on an unforced error is not a good look ...

As much as I love Joe, this just isn't smart.

I'll leave it at that ...

[gulliver]

29. Yep. Own it, correct it, pivot the spotlight to Trump

[elocs]

2. Frankly, most of these "Biden did this, forgot that" OPs might have a little credibility

as to their motive if they at least came from a poster who is undecided as opposed to one who has a dog in the fight.

[cwydro]

8. Seriously, do you really believe that all of the "undecideds" are really that?

I don’t.

Come on now.

[highplainsdem]

9. Agree. Many of the "undecideds" here show definite preferences, and opposition

to the front-runner for standing between their favorite candidates and the nomination.

[marble falls]

12. Me neither. Joe's a good man and we all mispeak on occasion. Ask my wife.

[NYMinute]

3. ...

[bluewater]

4. .

[bluewater]

10. Belated Welcome to DU!

As they say, you can't know the players with out a scorecard.

[marble falls]

13. I agree. I really hope we don't end up as mean as a past primary season was.

[highplainsdem]

5. This New Yorker article explains how even college students scramble remembered details:

https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/idea-happened-memory-recollection

R. T. first heard about the Challenger explosion as she and her roommate sat watching television in their Emory University dorm room. A news flash came across the screen, shocking them both. R. T., visibly upset, raced upstairs to tell another friend the news. Then she called her parents. Two and a half years after the event, she remembered it as if it were yesterday: the TV, the terrible news, the call home. She could say with absolute certainty that that’s precisely how it happened. Except, it turns out, none of what she remembered was accurate.

R. T. was a student in a class taught by Ulric Neisser, a cognitive psychologist who had begun studying memory in the seventies. Early in his career, Neisser became fascinated by the concept of flashbulb memories—the times when a shocking, emotional event seems to leave a particularly vivid imprint on the mind. William James had described such impressions, in 1890, as “so exciting emotionally as almost to leave a scar upon the cerebral tissues.”

The day following the explosion of the Challenger, in January, 1986, Neisser, then a professor of cognitive psychology at Emory, and his assistant, Nicole Harsch, handed out a questionnaire about the event to the hundred and six students in their ten o’clock psychology 101 class, “Personality Development.” Where were the students when they heard the news? Whom were they with? What were they doing? The professor and his assistant carefully filed the responses away.

In the fall of 1988, two and a half years later, the questionnaire was given a second time to the same students. It was then that R. T. recalled, with absolute confidence, her dorm-room experience. But when Neisser and Harsch compared the two sets of answers, they found barely any similarities. According to R. T.’s first recounting, she’d been in her religion class when she heard some students begin to talk about an explosion. She didn’t know any details of what had happened, “except that it had exploded and the schoolteacher’s students had all been watching, which I thought was sad.” After class, she went to her room, where she watched the news on TV, by herself, and learned more about the tragedy.

R. T. was far from alone in her misplaced confidence. When the psychologists rated the accuracy of the students’ recollections for things like where they were and what they were doing, the average student scored less than three on a scale of seven. A quarter scored zero. But when the students were asked about their confidence levels, with five being the highest, they averaged 4.17. Their memories were vivid, clear—and wrong. There was no relationship at all between confidence and accuracy.

-snip-

What Dunsmoor, Phelps, and Davachi found came as a surprise: it wasn’t just the memory of the “emotional” images (those paired with shocks) that received a boost. It was also the memory of all similar images—even those that had been presented in the beginning. That is, if you were shocked when you saw animals, your memory of the earlier animals was also enhanced. And, more important, the effect only emerged after six or twenty-four hours: the memory needed time to consolidate. “It turns out that emotion retroactively enhances memory,” Davachi said. “Your mind selectively reaches back in time for other, similar things.” That would mean, for instance, that after the Challenger explosion people would have had better memory for all space-related news in the prior weeks.

-snip-

So, if memory for events is strengthened at emotional times, why does everyone forget what they were doing when the Challenger exploded? While the memory of the event itself is enhanced, Phelps explains, the vividness of the memory of the central event tends to come at the expense of the details. We experience a sort of tunnel vision, discarding all the details that seem incidental to the central event.

-snip-

What this boils down to is that when you're remembering something that had a great emotional impact, your mind will authomatically bring in similar events, and your mind will also automatically focus on the central emotional impact, the central event, and minimize the details.

And that happens even with college students at top universities.

It isn't due to age or cognitive problems.

It's simply how our minds work.

[Thekaspervote]

11. This!!

[ancianita]

14. Memory studies show that people in the same/place /time/experience remember things differently.

Memory studies are not contradictory about it, either.

This includes families as much as groups of strangers.

[highplainsdem]

16. Exactly. As I mentioned to someone else here today, I've seen my relatives at family reunions

discussing various family events have lots of arguments about exactly what happened, and when, and who was there, etc. And the younger relatives do this just as much as the older ones.

[ancianita]

18. Your experience is the same as everyone else's. This memory crap about Biden is ageist BS.

Every single person's memories of events are different from everyone else's.

Memory studies prove this.

Memories are not only markers of our individual "self" formation, they are markers of our individual perceptual screens which build on memories before ANY shared experience. So there's NO way any two people will agree on something that happened right in front of their eyes and ears.

If only the 30% college crowd of America didn't have to drag the 30% media crowd -- and 70% of America that doesn't have college degrees -- kicking and screaming for election drama, into fair characterizations of candidates' utterances. (bad sentence, I know)

You get my point. I can't stand this.

Americans had better wake up to the damage control -- of a society and climate change -- that we're up against.

College degreed media should never pander to the ignorance of the public this way. It's trifling, unfair politics.

Mostly trifling.

[highplainsdem]

19. Peter Hamby had a really good piece about this stupid media coverage in Vanity Fair a couple of days

ago:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/joe-biden-gaffes-media-clickbait

[ancianita]

20. I've gotten Vanity Fair for 20+ yrs, New Yorker for 30, and yep, this is good media criticism.

I remember when we were deploring the NYT "unity vs racism" headline.

Along those lines, I'd say that criticism of Biden standing up for his memory is misplaced. It's news because trifling media are horse race, win-lose drivers of conflict and difference.

Vanity Fair's best sentence -- "But was this news?" -- should be our guide.

In a heated election we need to stand for light, not heat. And so we should ask ourselves before posting: Is it news?

Just because it's "new," doesn't make it news.

Just because we're for one candidate, doesn't mean we should be passive-aggressively against another.

Casting shade is cheap politics.

Biden can take it. But he shouldn't have to. None of our candidates should.

Thanks for the article. I hope everyone reads it.

[treestar]

15. There is a book "Educated"

by Tara Westover, about growing up in an anti-government family that also shunned doctors.

Due to the rash nature of their parents, especially their father, the kids in this family experienced several traumatic accidents with severe injuries.

In writing the books, the author consulted with her siblings on what had happened. She doubted some of her own memories, because brothers or sister would recall the same event very differently.

One story involved wondering whether the father even cared that his son was injured. She recalled finding her brother by himself and taking him back home. The injured brother remembered the father was there with them.

[Thirties Child]

28. I'm often appalled when I discover the misses in my memories

I will be certain that I remember exactly what happened -- and I'm not talking about major life-changing events -- and then find something I wrote about it at the time. Most times I didn't remember it at all accurately, assume it's true for most of us, most of the time. Or maybe I just have a particularly bad memory and that I'm the only one who doesn't remember. But I don't think so.

[Mr.Bill]

7. The beauty of any Democrat who runs against Trump is that no matter what

mistake the Democratic candidate makes, Trump, usually in a matter of hours will toss another shiny object into the air for everyone to look at.

Right now, there's this Biden story and Lawrence O'Donnell's mistake and Trump is bashing Comey, of all people. All we have to do is not bash each other and this race is a done deal.

[LiberalFighter]

17. Considering he has been around a while it is easy to get time and events confused.

Especially if they involve award events that follow the same pattern. Or other events.

[Demsrule86]

21. Sure all Republicans no doubt who remember it differently ...good thing most don't believe shit

these fuckers (Republicans)say...service is full of them.

[Gothmog]

22. This is from the young solider who received the medal

BTW, the opinion of the person who was the subject of the last so-called gaffe carries a great deal of weight with me

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

[rusty fender]

23. I guess, when Joe plagiarized Neil Kinnock,

he was just remembering, incorrectly, that he really wrote that speech. How many passes is Biden gonna get

[Cha]

24. "Tempests in Teapots"..

Joe was twice accused of, and acknowledged (in a loose sense), plagiarizing; one time what he said, the other what he wrote.
It's hardly as bad as it seems; the first was a one off where he cited in a speech a british member of parliament Neil Kinnock's speech, forgetting that day to note Neil, whereas Joe had indeed credited Neil in six previous incidences of the very speech.
The second was as a freshman in college, claiming he was unfamiliar with the rules for citing sources, quelle surprise, happens regularly to freshman college students. Sophomores too.

Both were members of a left-wing party, waging war against the far-right leaders of their countries, Thatcher and Reagan. And that's why Neil Kinnock, when asked whether he was bothered by the appropriation of his words, responded that he wasn't; to the contrary, he {Kinnock} confessed to feeling 'flattered'. https://psuaw.blogspot.com/

Wiki: {Biden} earned his bachelor's in 1965 from the Univ of Delaware, with a double major in history and political science ... He then entered Syracuse University College of Law,... During his first year there, he was accused of having plagiarized five of 15 pages of a law review article. Biden said it was inadvertent due to his not knowing the proper rules of citation, and he was permitted to retake the course after receiving an "F" grade, which was subsequently dropped from his record.. He received his Juris Doctor in 1968, graduating 76th of 85 in his class. Biden was admitted to the Delaware bar in 1969

May 1989: Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. was cleared of allegations that he committed plagiarism in law school by a panel under the authority of the Delaware Supreme Court ... The alleged law school plagiarism involved an essay Mr. Biden wrote in 1965 for an introductory class on legal methodology. 'A Personal Vindication'

A third example of plagiarism came to mind, same blog link above: What does Melania Trump's plagiarism tell us? .. Melania Trump got up last night to further her husband's success, and took her cue from Michelle Obama eight years ago. Her speech contained phrases which can only have been copied from the First Lady's earlier address, and so have been labelled as plagiarism.
This is a damning accusation and has prompted recollections of the last big plagiarism scandal to rock a US election, when Joseph Biden re-used Neil Kinnock's 'Thousand Generations' speech, was promptly labelled a plagiarist, and was forced to withdraw from the campaign
https://www.democraticunderground.com/128753436

[highplainsdem]

30. +1,000,000. Thanks, Cha! Great points!

[Cha]

25. And, from Gothmog's post above..

22. This is from the young solider who received the medal

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1287&pid=260689

[bearsfootball516]

27. Truth is, most people don't care about the gaffe.

Or any other mistakes he makes. It's why his polling is so consistent, despite slipups. People are so sick of Trump that they don't care when Biden makes flubs like this, they're going to vote for him anyway.