Binden embellishes story about tragic loss

As many of you know, Joe Biden’s first wife and young daughter were killed, and his son’s seriously injured, in a tragic motor vehicle crash in 1972. Recently, I do remember news reports that a drunk truck driver hit the family.

Author note: While I’m away from the computer, I’m republishing my top 20 posts from 2008 each afternoon. -Steve

Here’s the issue, just after the crash in December of 1972 and investigation did not come up with a cause. As a matter of fact, they specifically state that alcohol was not a factor. I can’t imagine what this would have been like for Biden – must have been terrible – but why embellish the story to include reference to a drunk driver?

That fact has not kept Biden from insinuating that the truck driver was drunk, or drank his lunch that day.

From Malkin’s post today.

While the national media is busy creating scandal out of the fact that Sarah Palin went to numerous non-Ivy League schools (yes, seriously), the Delaware News Journal has a devastating and disturbing piece on how Joe Biden has repeatedly slandered the man involved in the car crash that killed Biden’s first wife and daughter.

In several public statements over the years, Biden has insinuated that the man who caused the 1972 crash was drunk. The man cannot defend himself. He passed away in 1999. His family grieves.

Here is a link to the story in the Wilmington (Delaware) News Journal, and an excerpt…

Since his vice presidential nomination, Joe Biden’s 2007 statement that a “guy who allegedly … drank his lunch” and drove the truck that struck and killed his first wife and daughter has gained national media traction.

Alcohol didn’t play a role in the 1972 crash, investigators found. But as recently as last week, the syndicated TV show Inside Edition aired a clip from 2001 of Biden describing the accident to an audience at the University of Delaware and saying the truck driver “stopped to drink instead of drive.”

The senator’s statements don’t jibe with news and law enforcement reports from the time, which cleared driver Curtis C. Dunn, who died in 1999, of wrongdoing.

“To see it coming from [Biden’s] mouth, I just burst into tears,” Dunn’s daughter, Glasgow resident Pamela Hamill, 44, said Wednesday. “My dad was always there for us. Now we feel like we should be there for him because he’s not here to defend himself.”

Biden spokesman David Wade said Wednesday that the senator “fully accepts the Dunn family’s word that these rumors were false.”

It’s unclear who first suggested alcohol was a factor in the crash, but since Barack Obama tapped Biden to be his running mate on Aug. 23, The New York Times, National Public Radio and The Economist have run stories that characterized Dunn as a drunken driver.

“The rumor about alcohol being involved by either party, especially the truck driver, is incorrect,” said Jerome O. Herlihy, a Delaware Superior Court judge who was chief deputy attorney general and worked with crash investigators in 1972.

Am I implying that Joe Biden has been quietly suggesting that Dunn was a drunk driver, and allowing news outlets to perpetuate the rumor to gain sympathy as a candidate?

Yes.