Joe Biden said flatly the errors he made in a speech about a war hero were beside the point.
“Those details are irrelevant,” the former vice president, 76, said of the myriad errors he made during the telling of a story in which he honored a war hero. “The point I was making was relevant.”
He was speaking Wednesday on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS after a week of criticism for getting major details wrong in a story he recounted in New Hampshire about a war hero he had met. He got the location, the date, military branch, and medal wrong.
“I was not talking about me,” Biden told Colbert. “I was praising … the valor of all these people out there that I’ve visited in over 20 visits in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
“It’s a different thing to say, when you’re talking about honoring the bravery, or the sacrifice, or what other people went through, and the essence of it is absolutely true,” Biden said. “The fact that I said that I was vice president … well in one case I was vice president-elect, the other case I was a senator. I’m not sure that’s relevant. “
Biden further pushed aside his errant factual recount to discuss the ongoing crisis at the U.S. southern border. “I don’t get wrong, things like … we should lock kids up in cages at the border,” he said to boisterous studio applause. “I think there’s a difference whether you’re talking about somebody else.”
Further pressed to account for his mistakes in telling the details of a war hero’s efforts to honor his friend, Biden dismissed the notion that he should be required to tell things as they happened. “Those details are irrelevant when the point I was making was absolutely accurate.”
