tmedlin's blog

biden slanders a dead man, family grieves

 abuse

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.

But hey, who cares about Biden’s lies? Time to slander Gov. Palin and her family some more!

Here’s the intro of the N-J piece, but make sure to read to the end. And check out the comments from people who know Joe Biden best:

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.

“If it were some part of a cause of the accident, there would have been a charge, simply because if you’re driving under the influence and kill someone in the process — whether it’s the wife of a U.S. senator or anybody else — there’s going to be a charge,” he said.

Herlihy said investigators discussed several possible causes for the crash, including that Biden’s first wife, Neilia, turned her head and didn’t see the oncoming truck as she exited the intersection of Limestone and Valley roads on Dec. 18, 1972.