In fairness to Joe Biden, his 9/11 speech from Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska, yesterday wasn’t a disaster. But that’s simply because he’s set the presidential speechmaking bar so incredibly low. To our mild surprise, he stood straight and waited for the two speakers before him, Army Major General Brian Eifler and Air Force Chief Master Sergeant Amy Miller, to finish their remarks before he took to the lectern.

Then, whether coked up or not, he proceeded to read the teleprompter well enough to deliver a decent address. Oh, sure, it had that ill-timed and idiotic joke about wishing he’d had Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy blocking for him back in Scranton. “I could’ve been an All-American,” Biden said. And it had that disgraceful and not-so-subtle lumping together of murderous Islamist terrorism with the non-murderous political protest of January 6, 2021. But then, Joe Biden did what he always does.

“Ground Zero in New York,” he said. “I remember standing there the next day and looking at the building. I felt like I was looking through the gates of Hell, it looked so devastating because the way you could — from where you could stand.”

Unfortunately for President Walter Mitty, C-SPAN has videotape coverage of the Senate’s proceedings on September 12, 2001. And not only was Biden in DC, not New York, that day, but he also gave a speech on the floor of the Senate. As Fox News reports, “Records show the Senate met in the morning, and a classified briefing was held for all senators that afternoon at 2:00 p.m. ET.”

So much for being there at Ground Zero, hallowed ground, “the next day.” Even his own autobiography contradicts yesterday’s claim — although perhaps he’ll say he was misquoted.

Mr. President: It’s your right to tell any tall tale you wish at any occasion you wish, but we’d appreciate it if you didn’t defile 9/11 with your lies.

It’s weird with this president. His penchant for lying is creepy, almost reflexive. Whenever there’s a moment of mourning or solemnity, Biden feels an irresistible Gump-like urge to overdo his consoler-in-chief role by forcing himself into the narrative.

He began doing it years ago by viciously lying that a truck driver “drank his lunch” and killed his first wife and daughter by crossing over the line in the road. In fact, the police report made clear that the truck driver in question hadn’t been drinking and wasn’t even at fault — that, in fact, Mrs. Biden “drove into the path” of the tractor-trailer. “The driver of that truck,” wrote Kevin Williamson back in March, “went to his grave haunted by Biden’s lies, to the point where his children were forced to beg the [then] vice president to stop defaming their late father.”

He’s done it routinely to grotesquely glorify the death of his son Beau, who was 46 when he died of brain cancer in 2015 at Walter Reed Medical Center rather than having “lost his life in Iraq,” where he’d served from 2008-09 with the Delaware Army National Guard. The worst example of this was in late August 2021, during a ceremony at Dover Air Force Base for the 13 fallen warriors who’d been needlessly killed by a suicide bomber at Kabul’s Karzai International Airport. Their deaths were caused by the failure of military command to act on intelligence, but moreover by Joe Biden’s bizarre insistence that we evacuate our forces from Afghanistan by September 11 of that year so that he might claim it as some sort of strategic success. Here, once again, he defiled the meaning of September 11, 2001, by retreating and surrendering to the very regime that had given safe harbor to Osama bin Laden, by cutting and running from the murderous Taliban.

He did it three times just in Pittsburgh last month. He lied that he’d witnessed the Fern Hollow bridge collapse there in 2022, lied that his grandfather had died just days prior to his own birth at the same hospital, and lied about a supposed conversation he’d had with an Amtrak conductor who was actually dead when Biden said he’d talked to him. Call it a lie-fecta.

He lied in Hawaii, telling victims of the horrific wildfire there, the one that took out virtually an entire city and killed at least 115 people, that he could relate because he “almost lost my wife, my ‘67 Corvette, and my cat” in a small kitchen fire at his Delaware home.

Joe Biden, though, saved his worst for last yesterday, when, as The Washington Free Beacon reports, it was announced that the U.S. would waive the threat of sanctions “to allow the transfer of $6 billion in Iranian funds from South Korea to Qatar, a step needed to carry out a previously announced U.S.-Iran prisoner swap, according to a U.S. document seen by Reuters on Monday.”

That’s utterly disgraceful. “First Joe Biden used 9/11 as an excuse to flee Afghanistan,” said Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton. “Now he desecrates this day by paying ransom to the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism. Shameful.”

Is it too much to ask that the United States of America, on the day when we remember the worst-ever terrorist attack in our nation’s history, refrain from doing deals with terrorist states?

We thought not.

Never forget 9/11, fellow Patriots. Never, never forget that day. And don’t let a president’s lies detract from its solemnity or its fundamental importance.