The new Joe Biden book, "Original Sin," detailing the Democrats' conspiracy to deceive Americans about the carcass of a man sitting in the Oval Office, brought back warm memories. I really enjoyed that debate. So I'm ranking Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper's book as a must-read for any Republican.
But the key takeaways from the book weren't sufficiently highlighted by the authors.
The three main lessons from "Original Sin" are:
1. Democrats are monumental liars.
2. They're still lying.
3. The Biden dead-enders, who fought like banshees to keep him as the candidate, would have been Machiavellian geniuses, not con artists -- if only the media hadn't decided to dump the dementia patient.
As the book convincingly demonstrates, the entire Democratic Party lied ceaselessly about Biden, basically since the 2020 South Carolina primary. They lied in White House press briefings, in Signal messages, on social media. They lied in videos. They lied to the public, to the fact-checkers and to themselves.
They're still lying, but now they're lying about how, at the time, they really wanted to tell the truth. Or about how, in some evanescent moment, they secretly told someone the truth -- and, no, you can't talk to that person.
Half of them are still lying about Biden's mental capacity.
The scale and intensity of the lying is mind-boggling.
Merely mentioning Biden's age -- even by a New York Times reporter -- would send White House staffers into a frenzy, unleashing a team of attack dogs on social media to "shame journalists and create a disincentive structure for those curious about the president's condition," as the book puts it. (My first surprise. I did not know it was possible to shame journalists.)
When one of the book's authors -- a reporter, i.e. a liberal -- accurately wrote in Axios in early 2024 that Biden aides found it "difficult to schedule public or private events with the president in the morning, in the evening or on weekends," the White House quickly denounced him as a "peddler of fake news."
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Every Hollywood trick in the book was deployed by the Biden campaign simply to produce a decent short video. First, they cut the videos from five minutes to two. They used two cameras to make the jump-cuts less obvious, so that they could cut and paste any short bursts of coherence from the president to create the semblance of an actual sentence. They slowed videos of him walking to make his tortoiselike gait less obvious.
It didn't work. In September 2023, the White House sent a pre-recorded message from Biden to a naturalization ceremony in Gloucester, Massachusetts. But the video was from 2021. (It might have been from 1821 on close inspection.)
They brought in Hollywood heavyweights, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, to coach Biden and work on his lighting and microphone before any public appearances.
They lied about "cheap fakes" whenever any actual video of the president slipped into public view.
Now that it's over, Democrats are lying up a storm about how they almost told the truth.
Here are a couple:
"[After the debate, one] donor arrived determined to go up to Biden and plead with him to drop out but was talked out of it at the last second."
"[Chief of Staff] Jeff Zients kept it to himself, but after the debate, he thought that the president should drop out."
I'm in awe of their balls-to-the-walls bravery.
Others keep insisting that Biden's mind was FINE -- it was just a problem of his "communication skills." Not to be dense, but if he couldn't "communicate," how do we know what he was thinking? Telepathy?
But the book's authors were wildly impressed with the "communication" argument, citing it dozens of times.
Here are a few:
-- "Biden on a day-in, day-out basis could certainly make decisions ... [complicated by] his ability to communicate."
-- "House Democrats would see in the president's flawed presentation evidence of perhaps some communicative, if not cognitive, slippage."
-- [After a major international gaffe], "'He just struggles to communicate nuance,' one senior White House official told us. 'First, he's not a great communicator ...'"
-- "'The president's decisions were always solid and deeply considered,' [said a former senior administration official]. 'But the second part of that -- communicating those decisions -- that was never easy for him throughout his presidency."
-- "[Some staffers] believed that the president's decision-making was solid but also acknowledged that, yes, his communications were a problem."
-- Chris Hayes weighed in: "I think Joe Biden has a very good record on making decisions. And I think he is a very poor communicator right now."
-- "As for ... Biden's ability to communicate his sound decisions, those closest to [him] ... saw these abilities, or lack thereof, as separate from his core capacity."
-- "He had ... a stark inability to communicate ... Yet those same critics continued to the end to attest to his ability to make sound decisions."
How do I "communicate" this? It's completely insane. Did they bring a crystal ball to Cabinet meetings? You know who else makes great decisions but is totally unable to articulate them? A statue of Abraham Lincoln.
The authors themselves pitch the "communication" argument, saying: "Biden was weak throughout [the debate]. Not necessarily on the substance but on his ability to communicate."
Again, if he couldn't communicate, how do they know he was good on "substance"?
For example, what precisely did Biden mean when he responded to Donald Trump's claim that Democrats support abortion in the ninth month of pregnancy by saying, inter alia:
"[And] this is the guy who says the states should be able to have it. We're in a state where in six weeks you don't even know whether you're pregnant or not, but you cannot see a doctor, have your -- and have him decide on what your circumstances are, whether you need help."
You can't see a doctor? What?
"Look, there's so many young women who have been -- including a young woman who just was murdered and he went to the funeral. The idea that she was murdered by -- by -- by an immigrant coming in and (inaudible) talk about that. ..."
Was he proposing to abort illegals? That's a little aggressive, even for me, but OK.
Most weirdly, the authors themselves brush off Biden's Hiroshima of a debate by claiming that some critics will "sniff at the superficialities of such matters." Really? Name one.
When the entire Times editorial board calls for the Democratic presidential nominee to withdraw before the cameras are turned off, I'm pretty sure the problem with his debate performance wasn't merely cosmetic.
Finally, while Biden's inner circle, or "the Politburo," come across as power-mad nitwits in the book, they would have been studs if the Times editorial board had thought Biden still had a chance. But according to the book, post-debate polls gave Biden between a 1% and 5% shot at winning. (Must've been his makeup, you superficial dolts.)
In a truth-from-the-mouths-of-babies moment, earlier in 2024, CNN's MJ Lee had asked Biden about polls showing Americans were worried about his age.
Biden: "That is your judgment."
Lee: "This is according to public polling."
Biden: "That is not the judgment of the press."
For a Democrat, that's all that matters. Contrary to popular belief, the media is not the handmaiden of the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party is the handmaiden of the media. They are the ones calling the shots, but the media can't run the country unless Democrats are in power. So their No. 1 objective is to ensure that Democrats win elections.
Had Times editors believed Biden could win, then instead of that paper finally admitting, after four years of lying about it, that Trump never instructed people to inject bleach, they would have been calling the entire debate a "cheap fake."
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