Commentary
“Don’t they know it’s the end of the world …” — Skeeter Davis, 1962
President Biden has repeated a story he has told before, but repetition does not necessarily make it true.
Speaking last week in Somerset, Massachusetts, where a coal-fired power plant once stood, Biden again recalled growing up in Claymont, Delaware, where he said pollution was so bad “You had to put on your windshield wipers to get, literally, the oil slick off the window.”
The Wilmington News Journal has records dating back to 1923. They contain no stories I could find about oil slicks on car windshields in Delaware. I emailed the Journal and a reply came from Phil Freedman, regional editor for investigations and enterprise: “Dust and ash and other debris used to more regularly fall on cars and other horizontal surfaces there when those operations were running at full capacity. Biden has used this anecdote about the oil on the windshields before. I and a reporter who has covered him extensively, recall. But we cannot find the actual clips nor did we ever confirm it. It was just one of a bunch of stories he told.”…