President Joe Biden has been fond of saying, “I give you my word as a Biden,” when he wanted to assure those listening that he was speaking the unvarnished truth.

Given Biden’s track record across more than 50 years in political and public life, one might wonder when that phrase ever carried any weight.

So when Biden went back on his word and announced a pardon for his son Hunter, few who have followed his career should have been surprised.

For starters, we’re talking about a father and his son. As human beings, most of us can understand and relate to a man’s motivation to spare his son from the hardship of a federal prison sentence.

If Joe had said that from the start, there would have been the usual partisan criticism from Republicans, but on some level most of them would have appreciated the act on behalf of a troubled son. Hunter certainly hasn’t been a child for many years and surely knew he was breaking the law, but most of us would want to do what we could to protect our kids.

But for months, Joe insisted that he would issue no pardon for Hunter. Fellow Democrats and left-leaning political pundits took the president at his word. Some of them presented Joe’s declaration as some sort of iron-clad guarantee to counter the skepticism of Republicans.

On June 13, journalist John Harwood posted the following on X (formerly Twitter):

“People who insist Biden will pardon Hunter after specifically ruling it out are telling on themselves. They can’t imagine someone acting on principle and keeping his word.”

Correction: They couldn’t imagine Joe Biden acting on principle and keeping his word. It turns out that their skepticism was justified.

Needless to say, some people held onto their receipts. When Joe Biden announced on Dec. 1 that he had changed his mind and would pardon Hunter, they let Harwood and others who maintained that no pardon was coming hear about it.

Social media can be a giant, juvenile game of “Gotcha!” when it comes to politics, but if we’re being honest — see what I did there? — there were plenty of clues for Democrats who were sure Joe would keep his word.

When has he ever done that?

This is the same Joe Biden who plagiarized a speech by Welsh Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock during the 1988 presidential race and had to drop out.

But wait, there’s more:

Joe also lied about being in the top half of his law school class, having his house burn down with his wife in it, that his “Uncle Bosie” was eaten by cannibals in Papua, New Guinea during World War II and that his son Beau “lost his life in Iraq.”

The reality in each of those instances was much different. Joe was near the bottom of his class in law school, his uncle (Ambrose J. Finnegan) was lost when his plane crashed in the Pacific Ocean, and Beau died of cancer in 2015 at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Joe Biden is much like former U.S. Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), who also lied about many things that proved easy to verify or debunk.

Most recently, before the Democrat Party’s powers that be decided that Joe was no longer of any use to them, Biden insisted that then-President Donald Trump had left office in 2021 with inflation at 9%, when it was actually 1.4%.

We understand Joe wanting to protect Hunter. But we don’t understand why he spent months insisting there would be no pardon. We also do not understand why anyone would have believed those repeated lies.

editorial@vindy.com