XPost: alt.politics.republicans, talk.politics.guns, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh   
   XPost: sac.politics   
   From: primates@shaw.ca   
      
   President Biden claimed last month at the Naval Academy’s graduation   
   ceremony that he was appointed to the military school in 1965 by the late   
   Sen. J. Caleb Boggs (R-Del.), but a search of Boggs’ archives has failed   
   to turn up evidence to back the claim.   
      
   Curators at the Delaware Historical Association in Wilmington were able to   
   find records of Boggs’ academy nominations for just one year in the early   
   1960s and could not locate records for either 1965 or the more plausible   
   year 1961.   
      
   That means, barring evidence from an unlikely third party, that it’s   
   probable only Biden — who often shares incorrect or exaggerated memories —   
   can prove his claim.   
      
   “Our staff devoted a large chunk of last week to this project. We hauled   
   and sorted through a few dozen boxes from the relevant years, which proved   
   to be a needle-in-a-haystack proposition, as we feared,” chief curator   
   Leigh Rifenburg told The Post.   
      
   Rifenburg said the three-person library staff was able to find a list of   
   Boggs’ academy picks for 1962 after a “box-by-box” search, but that Biden   
   wasn’t on that list. A congressional nomination is needed to attend the   
   academy, but it’s unclear if Boggs nominated candidates each year,   
   Rifenburg said.   
      
   There are basic biographical problems with Biden’s claim that he was   
   appointed in 1965 — most significantly, the fact that Biden graduated from   
   the University of Delaware in 1965 before attending law school at Syracuse   
   University. The academy doesn’t grant graduate degrees.   
      
   “To be safe, we searched the full range of dates from 1960 to 1965. It   
   does seem extraordinarily unlikely that an appointment would have been   
   made in 1965, given President Biden’s years of matriculation at the   
   University of Delaware, but we wanted to be thorough,” Rifenburg said.   
      
   “We were unable to find appointments for entry in 1961, 1963, 1964, or   
   1965,” she said.   
      
   The Naval Academy, meanwhile, “does not keep preliminary applications” and   
   therefore would have no relevant records, director of media relations   
   Elizabeth Wrightson told The Post.   
      
   Biden’s speech on May 27 cast his supposed near-enrollment at Annapolis as   
   a laugh line. According to the president, during a 1972 Senate election   
   debate against Boggs, the then-incumbent remarked that his young   
   challenger would have still been in the military if he went to the academy   
   in 1965 — as he would have graduated in 1969 and then been commissioned   
   for five years.   
      
   “The best line of the debate was after it’s all over, the announcer, the   
   questioner — who was a good guy, but supported my opponent, who was a good   
   man as well, I might add — and he said, ‘Sen. Boggs, is there anything   
   else you want to say?’ And he said, ‘Yes, just one thing.’ And he took the   
   microphone. He said, ‘You know, Joe, if you accepted my commission to the   
   — my appointment to the academy,’ he said, ‘you’d still have one year and   
   three months’ active duty and I’d have no problems right now,'” Biden   
   said.   
      
   As vice president in 2010, Biden told a slightly different version of the   
   story at the Naval Academy’s graduation that year.   
      
   In the earlier version, Biden, who graduated from high school in 1961,   
   said he was “considered” by Boggs. He said that happened in 1960, which   
   also is potentially problematic because Boggs didn’t become a senator   
   until 1961.   
      
   “In 1960 I was a pretty good football player at the University of Delaware   
   and I was one of the guys that applied to come to this great academy,”   
   Biden said in 2010. “And a fellow named J. Caleb Boggs considered me and I   
   thought I was going to be a pretty good ballplayer. And then I found out   
   you had two guys in the backfield back in those days … and I realized I   
   wasn’t gonna get a chance to play at all. You had a guy named [Roger]   
   Staubach and a guy named [Joe] Bellino. So I went to the University of   
   Delaware.”   
      
   Bellino and Staubach are the only two Navy midshipmen to win the Heisman   
   Trophy as the best college football players in America. Bellino won the   
   award in 1960, while Staubach did so in 1963.   
      
   A White House official told The Post on Tuesday, “The president has spoken   
   about this in the past — including when he addressed the 2010 US Naval   
   Academy commencement. As he said in 2010, and recently, the president   
   considered attending the Naval Academy but ultimately took his football   
   talents to the University of Delaware.”   
      
   The president’s claim has outraged some listeners.   
      
   A widely read Monday post on Barstool Sports likened the claim to “stolen   
   valor” and compared it to North Carolina Republican Rep. Madison   
   Cawthorn’s misleading claim that his Naval Academy dreams were derailed by   
   the car accident that left him paralyzed. In fact, Cawthorn had been   
   turned down for admission before the accident took place.   
      
   Democrats hammered Cawthorn, 26, for the claim. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-   
   Calif.), for example, tweeted last year that “the biggest lie a politician   
   has ever told” was “[l]ying about getting into the Naval Academy.”   
      
   Biden, 79, is the oldest-ever sitting US president and his detractors   
   often accuse him of being in mental decline — though he also has a   
   decades-long record of telling stories that don’t add up.   
      
   The president frequently shares fictitious or embellished stories in an   
   attempt to relate to his audiences. For example, since taking office,   
   Biden has told at least seven times a chronologically impossible tale   
   involving a former Amtrak conductor to underscore his love of passenger   
   rail.   
      
   In another example, Biden in September told Jewish leaders that he   
   remembered “spending time at” and “going to” the Tree of Life synagogue in   
   Pittsburgh after the mass murder of 11 people in 2018. The synagogue said   
   he never visited and the White House later said he was thinking about a   
   2019 phone call to the synagogue’s rabbi.   
      
   Also in September, Biden told an Idaho audience that his “first job offer”   
   came from local lumber and wood products business Boise Cascade. The   
   company said it was news to them and Biden had not previously described an   
   interest in moving to the state.   
      
   In January, Biden told students of historically black colleges in Atlanta   
   that he was arrested during civil rights protests — for which there also   
   is no evidence.   
      
   Biden in 2020 claimed he “had the great honor of being arrested” in South   
   Africa when he was “trying to get to see [Nelson Mandela] on Robbens [sic]   
   Island,” where Mandela was in prison until 1990. He said Mandela thanked   
   him for it, but later admitted that it was untrue.   
      
   Biden ended his first presidential campaign in 1988 due to a scandal   
   involving plagiarism of speeches and a law school paper as well as   
   controversy over claims he made about his academic record.   
      
   https://nypost.com/2022/06/14/no-record-of-biden-naval-academy-   
   appointment-he-boasted-about/   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)