Karl Rove on Joe Biden's Lies

Karl Rove strongly condemned Joe Biden's story that he rebuked President Bush in a private meeting.

From FOX News:

"I hate to say this, but he's a serial exaggerator," Rove told FOX News. "If I was being unkind I would say liar. But it is a habit he ought to drop."

Rove added: "You should not exaggerate and lie like this when you are the Vice President of the United States."

Biden's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, although Biden spokesman Jay Carney told Fox on Wednesday: "The vice president stands by his remarks."

Carney was referring to two controversial assertions by Biden, the latest coming Tuesday during an interview on CNN.

"I remember President Bush saying to me one time in the Oval Office," Biden began, "'Well, Joe,' he said, 'I'm a leader.' And I said: 'Mr. President, turn and around look behind you. No one is following.'"

Of course, Biden is standing by his remarks. What's he going to say? "They're right. I made it up."

That would never happen.

The exchange is purely "fictional," said Rove, who was Bush's top political adviser in the White House.

"It didn't happen," Rove, a FOX News contributor and former Bush adviser, told Megyn Kelly in an interview taped for "On The Record." "It's his imagination; it's a made-up, fictional world.

"He ought to get out of it and get back to reality," Rove added. "He's making this up out of whole cloth."

Rove's skepticism was echoed by a variety of other Bush aides, including former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, chief of staff Andy Card and legislative liaison Candida Wolff.

They also disputed a similar assertion made by Biden in2004, when the former senator from Delaware told scores of Democratic colleagues at a lunch that he had challenged Bush's moral certitude about the Iraq war during a private meeting in the Oval Office. Two years later, Biden repeated his story about dressing down the president.

"When I speak to the president - and I have had plenty of opportunity to be with the president, at least prior to the last election, a lot of hours alone with him. I mean, meaning me and his staff," Biden said on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" in April2006. "And the president will say things to me, and I'll literally turn to the president, say: 'Mr. President, how can you say that, knowing you don't know the facts?' And he'll look at me and he'll say - my word - he'll look at me and he'll say: 'My instincts.' He said: 'I have good instincts.' I said: 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough.'"

On Thursday, Rove ridiculed the claim that Biden spent "a lot of hours alone with" Bush.

"Joe Biden was never alone with the president for more than few moments," Rove said. "There was staff in the room the whole time."

Rove is not holding back.

He seems to be genuinely disturbed by Biden's behavior, his overactive imagination and overactive mouth, passing off fiction as fact.

Rove was equally appalled by Biden's claims of having given Bush his comeuppance.

"If you notice, all of these incidents have the same structure: Joe Biden courageously raises the impudent question; the president befuddles the answer; and Joe Biden drives home the dramatic response."

Rove scoffed at Biden's claims that "he and the president were sitting there in the Oval Office, he was tutoring the president, he was asking him the critical questions that no one was willing to confront him with."

"With all due respect to the vice president, these are the kind of things you can get away with if you are a United States Senator, ora backbencher in the U.S. House of Representatives," Rove said. "You should not exaggerate and lie like this when you are the Vice President of the United States."

I think the real question here is not whether Biden is telling the truth. It's whether he sincerely BELIEVES he's telling the truth. Does Biden buy his own lies?

Some people say that O.J. Simpson convinced himself to truly believe that he wasn't the killer of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.

I think there's a similar thing going on with Biden.

For instance, Jonah Goldberg had a great analysis of Biden's performance in the vice presidential debate in 2008. I think it sums up Biden quite well.

What struck me the most about the debate – and it probably helped having quintessential Obamaphiles in the room – was how Biden’s “gravitas” is derived almost entirely from the fact that he can lie with absolute passion and conviction. He just plain made stuff up tonight.

And when Biden isn't lying with "absolute passion and conviction," be mindful that he might be engaging in plagiarism.