We have followed a long line of false claims by President Joe Biden, some of which recently earned him a “bottomless Pinocchio” from the Washington Post. Some of these claims raise serious concerns over their use to change policies or law about election law, border agents, Second Amendment, gun capacity. Others are more trivial but bizarre like accounts of his Amtrak conductor, truck driving past, and other stories have long been the subject of jokes in Washington. Yesterday, added to the latter category with odd claims about poultry in Delaware.
I admit that I am a sucker for the annual campy pardoning of the turkeys at the White House. The recipients this year were “Chocolate” and “Chip.”
In the ceremony, Biden made a statement that again led many of us to reach for our phones for Internet searches. The President declared “We have more chickens than anybody in the nation in Delaware, but we don’t have turkeys.”
Clearly, there are many turkey farms in Delaware, but it was the chicken claim that popped out for many of us. After all, the state is called the Blue Hen state and he did represent the state for decades. Could it be possible that tiny Delaware dominates the chicken market?
The answer is no and it is not even close. Delaware does not even crack the top ten list:
- Iowa
- Ohio
- Indiana
- Pennsylvania
- Georgia
- Texas
- Arkansas
- North Carolina
- Michigan
- California
The Blue Hen label appears a term that originated in cockfighting circles going back to the Revolutionary War. Now to add insult to injury. It turns out that, while the University of Delaware teams are called the Blue Hens, the Blue Hen is not even recognized as a breed of chicken. I did not know that until this week’s “Chickengate” and questions of what the President knew and when knew it about poultry.
One last useless fact: chicken can fly. Thus, it is possible that the President could argue that it depends when you count your chickens during migrating season. The problem is that chicken flights extend only a few feet despite the moniker of the Red Hens for the 166th Airlift Wing and its 142d Airlift Squadron in Delaware.