Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, Jake Tapper, as told to Alex Thompson
First the good: easy to read, lots of shocking, damning anecdotes, and it clocks in at a reasonable length (314 pages).
Now the bad: nearly all the shocking, damning anecdotes are anonymous, and the authors just breeze by the most shocking and damning anecdotes like they’re not the real story… because they weren’t (but should be).
What is Original Sin about? Joe’s physical but mostly cognitive decline. There are hundreds of witnesses to countless dozens of truly shocking episodes of Joe Biden being non compos mentis. That’s the bulk of the book, but given that they got several of these witness testimonies from at least four cabinet members, it’s particularly galling that the 25th Amendment was never invoked and the authors don’t bother to ask any of them why not.
The authors’ real goal with the book was to cover their posteriors for what was clearly the most open secret in Washington: Biden was completely unfit for the presidency as far back as 2017, which, to their credit, they did note. It came on page 98 in a section of the book on the tapes Biden’s post-vice-presidency ghostwriter made.
“Biden sounded very old and quite diminished.
In 2017.”
That should have been page one. It should have been page one of an entirely different book; one that plumbed and mined sentences like this one regarding Biden’s familial pardons:
“To many Democrats, this was another ignominious act by a president who repeatedly put the interests of his family ahead of those of his party and his country.”
This statement, fairly groaning under the weight of questions the authors leave 
unasked, never mind unanswered, came on page 308, six pages from the end.
Which Democrats?
What other “ignominious” acts?
What specifically happened “repeatedly”?
How exactly did he “put the interests of his family ahead of the party”? Ahead of the “country”?
Every single one of those questions just… lies there, an unheard echo on the pages of Original Sin.
Now, to be fair, it’s rare to see a member of the media-Democrat complex make such declarations of corruption about one of their own, and this book has several of them… but they’re all just breezed by, with perfunctory weight, as if the authors were ticking off a list of corrupt Biden actions so they could say later, “We addressed that in our book.” Boom. Conversation ended. Like this gaping hole of corruption they left yawning regarding Huter’s laptop:
“Biden’s team quietly had the DNC obtain a copy of the hard drive. The campaign needed to be politically prepared, and Biden needed to be personally prepared.
In early 2023, Bob Bauer privately met with the president and the First Lady for an hour to go through all the sordid details. Having recaptured the House, congressional Republicans seemed likely to broadcast some of the most embarrassing pictures, text messages, and email involving not just Hunter but the entire Biden family. Biden’s brother Jimmy would get dragged into it, given his business dealings with Hunter that capitalized on the family name. [snip]
The hideousness of Hunter’s personal life was another unacknowledged ugliness.
He seemingly brushed it all off -- the influence peddling, the infidelities, the drug use, the child he had denied. [Emphasis added]
Imagine any single one of these issues had belonged to an adult presidential child named “Trump.” There would be no end to the Brady-Bunch style TV boxes of talking heads tut-tutting the unseemliness of it all, the depravity… the criminality.
Yet Tapper & Thompson just devote a sentence, a paragraph, a page, here and there, leaving them like abandoned puppies yipping by the side of the road.
What’s so shocking -- if we’re even capable of being shocked by the partisans-with-press-passes anymore -- is how matter-of-fact they are -- now that it can’t hurt Biden’s (or Kamala Harris’) electoral prospects. They don’t even try to deny it. They just state it, as a matter of fact for the historical record. Up to a minute before the race was called for Trump in November of last year, these were the “conspiracy theories” of the “right.” Now it’s just fact, to be remarked on without much, if any at all, editorial resistance. Again, no doubt so they can point at it and end any future accusations of dishonest reportage, say, when they are next accepting a prize for their fine “journalism.” And Tapper, who reportedly hired a PR firm to help him with his book-tour phraseology, says over and over again that he looks back on his reporting “with humility.”
Uh-huh. Ka-ching.
Should you read it? Well, if you’re like me, you felt duty bound to, because getting any kind of truth-telling from this press corps is rare, even if it is almost all blind quotes. It is, indeed, shocking how decrepit Joe was, from the start. People he’d known for 20, 30, 40 years were strangers to him. He’d tell the same story twice, with only a minute or two in between. We all saw him wandering off, looking confused, mouth agape, etc. It’s all there.
But, if you’re like me, you don’t want to give Jake Tapper a penny. The solution? Buy a second-hand copy off eBay or some other platform. That’s what I did, and it solved the problem of my feeling duty bound to read it but also not wanting to put a penny of my money in Tapper’s pocket.
There’s your “humility,” fella.
Image: Penguin Books
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