Desperate times call for desperate measures. And Joe Biden is desperate.

Buffeted by atrocious polling and repeated calls from fellow Democrats to drop out of the 2024 president race lest he get his clock cleaned by the dreaded Donald Trump, Biden did what any dementing octogenarian would do: He lashed out with falsehoods.

The former president referred to American service members as “suckers” and “losers.”

MAGA extremists have made it clear where they stand. pic.twitter.com/2Kj5jr4N7Z

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 2, 2023

Indeed, MAGA-addled Joe Biden is back to regurgitating unsubstantiated and anonymously sourced smears about his predecessor and increasingly likely successor in the Oval Office. Class act, that Joe Biden.

“I’m not making this up,” Biden lied. “I know we all try not to remember, but that’s what he said [sic]. He called [sic] servicemen suckers and losers. Was John McCain a sucker? Was my son Beau, who lived next to a burn pit for a year, came home and died? Was he a sucker for volunteering to serve his country?”

Back in October 2020, when these anonymously sourced, context-free remarks first surfaced in an Atlantic article from Trump-hater Jeffrey Goldberg, we thoroughly debunked them. Most compelling was this account from Major General William Matz, secretary of the American Battle Monuments Commission, who was there on site with the president in France at the time he visited a World War I memorial to our fallen warriors: “I vividly recall greeting him and standing with him in the pouring rain beside the grave of a WWI soldier, as our superintendent briefed the story of the soldier’s life. The President was deeply moved. … After I introduced him, and as the rain continued, he went on to deliver a powerful and very fitting speech during which he directly addressed the World War II veterans in attendance, calling them out by name and thanking them for their service. Throughout the entire visit, President Trump demonstrated heartfelt admiration for our nation’s heroes.”

Columnist Gary Bauer also took Biden to task for repeating those lies, and for his more general habit of lying during his stump speeches: “Biden talked about his son Beau’s service in Iraq and then blasted the president for allegedly calling our veterans ‘losers’ and ‘suckers.’ Those false charges are from an Atlantic story that has been repudiated by 21 current and former officials, including John Bolton, who is no fan of the president. Yet Biden continues to repeat this outrageous lie.”

And yet the Trump haters keep trotting out those remarks. In addition to Biden, whom history will note as having had a hate-hate relationship with the truth, former Trump chief of staff John Kelly brought them up in an anti-Trump screed to CNN’s Jake Tapper:

What can I add that has not already been said? A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all “suckers” because “there is nothing in it for them.” A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because “it doesn’t look good for me.” A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family — for all Gold Star families — on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are “losers” and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women. A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason — in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law. There is nothing more that can be said. God help us.

God help whom, exactly? The ever-dwindling number of Americans who think Biden is doing a bang-up job as president?

With respect to the general, there are a few more things that can be said — such as the utter lack of fairness or context for his comments. Trump’s “open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families,” for example, was directed toward Khizr Muazzam Khan and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a fallen Iraq War soldier, who were invited by Hillary Clinton to attack Trump at the 2016 Democrat National Convention instead of attacking the former Republican president who’d started that war or the Democrat presidential nominee who’d voted for it as a U.S. senator. And Trump never said former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley “should lose his life for treason,” and he certainly didn’t do it “in expectation that someone will take action.” That’s an unhinged assertion by Kelly, and it’s beneath him.

It’s desperation time for the Trump-hating hordes, but not even the hard-lefties at Snopes, the truthiness site famous for casting conservatives and Republicans in the worst light possible, could support the claims being trotted out anew. As Snopes put it:

There appeared to be no evidence of an audio or video recording of the remarks in question, nor was there any documentation, such as transcripts or presidential notes, to independently confirm or deny the alleged quotes’ authenticity. Moreover, since Snopes did not witness the in-question comments firsthand, we can’t say for certain whether Trump called fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers.”

No evidence? You don’t say.

To be sure, there’s often a difference between what Trump says and what he means. His brash rhetorical style is to fire for effect, to occasionally exaggerate in order to make a more important point — as opposed to, say, Biden, who simply seems to lie as a matter of reflex.

Trump is also a notoriously tough guy to work for, and that must be especially so for men like John Kelly and James Mattis, highly accomplished career military men who late in their careers became Beltway creatures and protectors of the Swamp status quo — a status quo that Trump has repeatedly vowed to upset.

But no amount of disagreement or desperation about Trump’s candidacy can excuse the sorts of smears being leveled at him now. He’s said plenty of incendiary things on the record. Far better to let his actual words speak for themselves rather than trotting out unbelievable and unsubstantiated utterances like “suckers” and “losers.”

Updated with additional context on the Gold Star family to which Donald Trump showed “open contempt”.