Although President Biden's Secret Service code name is "Celtic," there is nothing secret about Joe Biden's pride in his Irish descent. Those feelings are longstanding (the man is 80 years old, after all) and last month, at a St. Patrick's Day lunch, no one was surprised when Biden said being Irish is "part of my soul."
With the president spending this week in Ireland, his nostalgia for his ancestral homeland has been much in the news. The best piece I saw was written by National Journal White House correspondent George Condon, who wrote: "[Biden] talks frequently about his pride in his Irish heritage, often quotes Irish poets, and admits that he has an ‘Irish temper' and sometimes ‘gets my Irish up.' As audiences well know three years into his presidency, his favorite go-to move is to talk about his formative years in the Irish Catholic neighborhoods of Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Sometimes, Biden goes a bit further, as he did at the aforementioned St. Patrick's Day lunch when he said that a grandfather told him, "Joey, remember, the best drop of blood in you is Irish." It's all pretty harmless, though, and if you're Irish American, heartwarming.
There are pitfalls when Biden starts speaking off-the-cuff, however, and if you sensed something could go wrong when Uncle Joe veered into Blarney-ville during his Ireland trip, your instincts were sound.
Members of the traveling White House staff were already bristling at questions from the U.K. media about whether the president is anti-British, when Biden ended a speech at the Windsor Bar and Restaurant in County Louth with a shout-out to distant cousin Rob Kearney, a rugby player, who was in the audience.
"He was a hell of a rugby player, and he beat the hell out of the Black and Tans," Biden said.
As Irish rugby afficionados know, Rob Kearney's team never played the "Black and Tans." They played the "All Blacks," which is the name of New Zealand's rugby team. (That moniker refers to the Kiwis' uniforms, and has no racial connotations, though Lord knows how Biden might garble that bit of sports history if he got going.)
But what is a "Black and Tans," you ask?
If you order one at The Dubliner, Washington D.C.'s favorite Irish bar, you'd get a Guinness with some Bass Ale poured into the glass, an ecumenical beer to be sure, although in the Republic of Ireland such a concoction would simply be called a "half-and-half." In Ireland, "Black and Tan" is still the hated name of anti-independence irregulars who countered Irish Republican Army atrocities with horrifying terrorism of their own -- the most notorious example taking place on "Bloody Sunday" in 1920, when Black and Tans responded to the IRA killing of 14 suspected informants by attacking a Gaelic football game in Dublin, killing 14 innocent spectators and wounding five dozen more.
A century later when some British commentators reacted negatively to Biden's Freudian slip, the traveling White House contingent downplayed it. The official White House transcript was altered -- a troubling habit of Biden's presidency -- and national security spokeswoman Amanda Sloat told reporters, "I think for everyone in Ireland who is a rugby fan, it was incredibly clear that the president was talking about the All Blacks and Ireland's defeat of the New Zealand team in 2016."
True enough, but as George Condon pointed out, Biden knows full well about the Black and Tans, whom he's mentioned before to an Irish audience. In a 1988 interview with IrishCentral, Biden claimed that as a boy his "Aunt Gertie" told him hair-raising tales about the brutality of the Black and Tans. "After she'd finish telling me the stories, I'd sit there or lie in bed and think at the slightest noise, ‘They're coming up the steps,'" said Biden.
There is no way to know if that happened. Biden has a long history of exaggerating and prevaricating even about the most personal aspects of his family history. But whether accurate or not, the Black and Tans blooper this week underscores the problem with a president going off-script on foreign soil, especially a president whose mouth and brain aren't always in perfect synchronicity.
Mark Twain put it this way in an Oct. 15, 1890, letter to George Bainton: "The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter -- it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."
And that's our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
