President Joe Biden was caught trying too hard to win over Wisconsin voters when he presented an allegedly fictitious anecdote about a teacher from his Delaware Catholic high school being picked by the Green Bay Packers.
My theology lecturer at the Catholic school I attended was a man named Reilley, last name. “And he was drafted by the Green Bay Packers,” Biden stated during a speech in Sturtevant, Wisconsin, on Wednesday.
And he decided to become a priest before that, therefore he did not go. But every single Monday that Green Bay won, we got the last period of the day off,” Biden explained.
The statement was initially identified as a potential Ron Burgundy moment by online users who pondered why the president said ‘last name.’
However, online sleuths promptly checked online Green Bay Packers draft records dating back to the 1930s, and no apparent Rileys or Reilleys were selected.
We Catholics call this indirect bribery. But it worked,” Biden said, eliciting laughter in the Rust Belt state with a large working-class Catholic population.
To add to the confusion, Biden recounted a separate story in 2021 about Father Diny instilling a lifetime passion of the Packers in Biden, who grew up in Delaware and Pennsylvania.
‘I went to a Catholic boys school in Claymont, Delaware, taught by an order of priests known as the Norbertines,’ he told WTMJ back then. ‘The Norbertines had an Abbey residence in DePere.
Every Sunday when the Packers won, the headmaster, Father Justin E. Diny, would turn on the PA system and declare, “Gentlemen, no last period today.”
‘He made all of us Packers supporters. Besides, I’m afraid I’ll go to hell if I don’t root for the Packers. Father Diny might come back. I can’t oppose Father Diny. He’d come out of his grave if he knew I was pulling for someone else.
Diny is identified as the previous headmaster of Archmere Academy, where Biden played high school football.
A single Reilly in the club’s history was conscripted in 1947 and later became an Air Force general, according to the New York Post.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the apparent discrepancy. However, an official White House transcript published Wednesday afternoon included the spelling ‘Reilley’ beside Biden’s remarks.
The bungled move occurred as Biden stormed through battleground Wisconsin, where he slammed a proposed $10 billion plant originally hailed by Donald Trump as a ‘con’ and mocked his predecessor for promoting it.
He mocked Trump in Sturtevant, Wisconsin, for applauding the large industrial project in Racine and proclaiming it the ‘eighth wonder of the world,’ while also launching a new Microsoft facility to function as an AI data center on the same property.
‘He and his administration pledged a $10 billion investment from Foxconn to develop a new manufacturing facility and create 13,000 new jobs. In reality, he came here with your Senator Ron Johnson, clutching a golden shovel and pledging to build the world’s eighth wonder. Are you kidding me? Biden inquired, prompting laughter from a gathering of fans.
Look what occurred. They dug a hole with their golden shovels and then fell into it.
Look, they didn’t shovel more dirt; they did shovel some. 100 dwellings were demolished. They squandered hundreds of millions of dollars from your state and municipal taxes to promise a project that never materialized. Foxconn turned out to be exactly that: a fraud.
‘Go figure,’ he remarked.
Trump announced the proposal with much fanfare in 2017 as part of his ‘America First’ strategy, but the Taiwanese corporation substantially cut it back a few years later, citing’market changes.’
According to the most recent RealClearPolitics average, Trump leads Biden by half a percentage point in the battleground state, which he won in 2016 but lost to Biden in 2020.
