Origin of Sin ("Original Sin" by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson) Review
I read it so you don't have to.
"Biden’s too old", says Jake Tapper; "Duh!!!" Says America.
The following video added in post, due to not being able to find it before publishing:
So, I’ll begin with this. When I first heard that this book was coming — after Tapper shamelessly plugged it everywhere in America — my first thought was what a hilarious thing to do.
Get a book deal, write a book, and promote it as an investigated, researched, tell-all of the cover-up that you and your entire sector of journalism carried out personally.
The book should’ve been called “My Original Sin.” But before I go on to criticize it mercilessly, I must first say this… It’s pretty good. It contains mainly everything. Plus, some tidbits that weren’t public. Nothing that changed the story, but enough that we can read between the lines and see it in a more detailed light.
It has zero enlightenment, or accountability, but it does confirm everything we were seeing with our own eyes and journalists on the right and left (mainly outside of corporate media) had been yelling at the top of our lungs and being called bad names for saying.
It’s a pretty honest book to be written by such a dishonest person.
The premise is dishonest, but the book seems to be honest.
Going through it I kinda had to remember that while he is saying all of this, he is also leaving out his part of the corporate media cover-up, but it didn’t matter because this cover-up was so vast and broad that you could write a detailed book about the cover-up, leave out your part, and it still feel complete.
I also thought that maybe he was gonna admit to his part in the cover-up. Take accountability for it a little bit, but that chapter must have got cut by the editor. Maybe they said it too “wordy.” Like this introduction.
With that being said, if you want the whole “Behind the Scenes” of how far they were going and how things were playing out, all wrapped up in one place this is an excellent book, and an even better book review.
It’s all there, all the way down to how they rigged the Primary to make sure the sitting president was the only one with a chance to win.
There’s quite a bit of apologia for party and the administration. Mostly in the form of things like, “No one else could beat Trump.” Or one aptly named chapter “He Totally Fucked Us”.
I don’t know much about Alex Thompson, maybe he’s as innocent as they come, but if he is he’s in bad company, because Jake Tapper definitely took part in the cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline, and even the character assassination of anyone who criticized the president or his media lapdogs.
Maybe he secretly wanted Biden to drop out and allow a Primary process that would possibly produce a viable candidate for the Democratic party. Hell, they might’ve got my vote. I’ll vote for less bombs and more speech. Now, enough about myself, let’s get into this book.
“Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board,” said one person familiar with the internal dynamic. A cabinet secretary expressed a similar sentiment about the Politburo. “I’ve never seen a situation like this before, with so few people having so much power. They would make huge economic decisions without calling [Treasury] Secretary Yellen.”
Tapper, Jake; Thompson, Alex. Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again (p. 45). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
The “Original Sin”
This book was filled with villains. Most of the villains in this book, were working in their own interests. They had a job to do and that job was keeping the 25th amendment at bay. If Biden was impeached, it would be unemployment for them.
There is, however, moments of villainy that really stand out. Such as the acts of White House doctor for the president Dr. Kevin O’Conner.
On November 19—the day before the president’s seventy-ninth birthday—the White House released the results of Biden’s health examination by White House physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor. The assessment was perhaps more notable for what it didn’t include than for what it did: There was no mention of a cognitive exam. That seemed odd to physicians who were paying attention. Many consider it standard practice to begin performing such tests when a patient turns sixty-five, even if they aren’t showing symptoms. Several of the tests can be done in about ten to fifteen minutes. They do not provide conclusive diagnoses; rather, they are a tool for early detection.
It seemed appropriate to perform a cognitive test on a seventy-eight-year-old man—especially one who was starting to show flashes of memory loss, especially one who was president of the United States.
Dr. O’Connor has been Biden’s doctor for 13 years. Let’s see what he had to say about President Biden’s decline:
O’Connor told people that the ten-minute test was for physicians who saw their patients only occasionally, and he constantly saw the president.
When others suggested doing the test to make sure that Biden was capable of being president, O’Connor would sometimes point to the Oval Office and say, “Biden’s already being president.”
He’d add that people may not like how Biden was doing the job, but that was different than being incapable.
“President Biden remains a healthy, vigorous 78-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency,” he wrote.
Still, O’Connor detailed Biden’s physical deterioration. The president’s “ambulatory gait is perceptibly stiffer and less fluid than it was a year or so ago,” and he has “experienced increasing frequency and severity of ‘throat clearing’ and coughing during speaking engagements,” he wrote. Biden was old and had a shuffle, so O’Connor arranged for a neurological exam to see if his physical movements signaled a deeper disorder, such as Parkinson’s.
“There were no findings which would be consistent with any cerebellar or other central neurological disorder, such as stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s or ascending lateral sclerosis,” O’Connor wrote. Still, some doctors speculated that the only reason to perform a neurological test but not a cognitive one was if you feared the results. (pp. 46-47 Kindle Edition)
{h}e privately expressed worry about the toll it was taking. He fought other Biden officials on scheduling to try to get Biden more rest. O’Connor quipped that Biden’s staff were trying to kill him, while O’Connor was trying to keep him alive. (p. 48)
Let’s skip to right before the election. A chapter called “The Last Medical Exam”, which came in the aftermath of the Hur report, where Special Council Robert Hur stated he would pass on prosecution because the jury would see Biden “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” and would never convict. Good news, right? Wrong.
The name of this book should have been “The Great Enabling.”
We can now actually watch that interview in full, but it’s a long rough watch. I’ll post it below:
Taking place in February 2024, “The Last Medical Exam” seemed to be a fluke, now, since they obviously missed the cancer that was currently growing in his prostate. Dr. O’Connor:
O’Connor had long pushed back on political advisers interfering in his medical evaluations. He told others that he did not believe the science required him to do a cognitive test. He saw the president frequently, and if he had reason for concern, he would have performed one. Ultimately, Biden’s political advisers agreed.
They had also boxed themselves in with their own public insistence that Biden had not lost a step and was as sharp as ever. Finally doing a test would be an admission that there were reasons for concern. And even if Biden did do a test, his aides believed that his critics would still not be satisfied. There was also the risk of the unknown, of what such a test might reveal. On February 28, O’Connor released his final medical summary, which listed degeneration of Biden’s spine and the new use of a nightly breathing machine for sleep apnea. But Doc declared Biden “fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.”
Citing O’Connor, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at the briefing that Biden had no need for a cognitive test.
“He passes a cognitive test every day.” (p. 146)
That was in February.
Now, take those words, and watch this video:
See how smooth he talks, now here’s 2020:
Pretty rough but we could explain it, now here’s 2024, post-“final exam”:
So, my only defense of this is I have 2 little kittens. Now, I see them every day so it’s hard me to tell they are growing, because it’s happening gradually every day. But I looked at a picture of them from a couple months ago and realized, “Oh, shit, they’re getting really big!”
Or, even more relevant to this, I have a kind of a stutter but it’s more like, I repeat a word quickly halfway through it. But I do it so quickly it’s hard to notice. A friend who was used to seeing me every day came to visit me in jail, and five minutes into the conversation she said, “Jordan! Are you developing a stutter?”
I said, “No, I’m talking-I’m talking j-just like I always have.”
She said, “Are you sure? Are you okay in there?”
I said, “I’m doing fine. It’s-it’s actually not so bad, so bad, in here right now. Dad’s in here with me and it could be a lot-lot worse.”
I haven’t stopped noticing it ever since. But she didn’t notice it until she hadn’t seen me in a while.
Maybe, now this is granting him a lot more grace than I think he deserves, if Dr. O’Connor hadn’t seen him all the time he would’ve noticed that Joe Biden doesn’t have a stutter, Joe Biden is dying in front of us on live television, or maybe he’s a villain in this conspiracy also, and didn’t want to lose the highlife. Working as a doctor to the president.
The name of this book should have been “The Great Enabling.”
Let’s Talk About the Politburo
The “Politburo” is the group of loyalists that came with Biden. They all had extensive experience in politics and had the ear of the president.
One of them, the aides would sometimes joke, “could get Biden to start a war if they wanted.”
In the 2020 campaign, titles meant little. There was technically a campaign manager, a communications director, and deputy campaign managers, but the ultimate decision-makers were a group of seasoned political veterans known internally by any number of nicknames, including “the Politburo”: Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, and the policy wonk Bruce Reed. They’d worked with Biden for many years, if not decades.
There were other close aides. Anita Dunn and her husband, Bob Bauer, joined the team in 2015 to help Biden prepare for a presidential bid, even as most of their colleagues from the Obama administration backed Clinton. (p. 20)
Mike Donilon
“Donilon had been in the center of Democratic politics for decades, shaping dozens of campaigns, beginning in the late 1980s when he worked on the campaign of Douglas Wilder, the first African American ever elected as governor. Something of a loner, he was a man of few words and could be immovable when he had a theory of the case. A former pollster, he now often went with his gut. He had crafted Biden’s messaging for 2020—“a fight for the soul of the nation”—even as the data supporting that approach was fuzzy at best.”
“Donilon’s brothers were also in the national spotlight; one had been a national security adviser for Obama, and the other was the spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Boston. They shared Biden’s Irish Catholic working-class self-image. The president valued Mike Donilon’s advice so much that aides would later joke that if he wanted, he could get Biden to start a war.”
“Ricchetti, an affable former lobbyist and an alum of the Clinton White House, had been Biden’s chief of staff through Beau’s illness. Ricchetti was also a friend, and all four of his children would end up working in the Biden administration.” (p. 21)
Reed had grown up in Idaho, the son of a politician, and had been a Rhodes Scholar studying English literature and a speechwriter for Al Gore. (p. 21)
The next layer of leadership outside the Politburo was “Anita Dunn, expert in communications and (Bob) Bauer, a respected lawyer, who had both worked for the most powerful Democrats in Washington. They didn’t have the almost familial ties that Donilon, Ricchetti, and Reed did, but Dunn and Bauer had more credibility with the Democratic establishment, including Obama.” And with them came another layer of secrecy about the president.
Aspects of the Cover-Up
This cover-up, maybe not as consequential, only time will tell that, but more widespread, with more characters and more dishonest actors, than Watergate or Iran-Contra.
This cover-up started with his family, then the “Politburo”, the aides, the Cabinet, Pentagon, State Department, then if it gets past all that, the corporate media is there to do their due diligence and discredit what you “think” you saw.
Press conferences were pre-planned and workshopped. Joe had flashcards and pre-written answers during interviews. When something happened like in the picture above when Joe fell off the bike, there was an internal crisis, and prewritten answers for when it came up during the press conference.
Jake Tapper maintains that he wasn’t part of this and was actually “very critical” of the president’s health, but there is no way that he didn’t know about the president reading off a teleprompter during interviews. Interviews that took place at CNN.
And get this, it still wasn’t enough. They couldn’t coverup everything. Not in the information age. I’ve never been to DC, but I knew my president’s health had declined, and I was still very early in my political journey. Joe Rogan was talking about it in 2020!
Anyone who pointed out this decline, especially if they had something to lose was shamed into losing it.
Critics of the Decline
In the right wing/independent left everyone said that Joe Biden was fucking up by running again. His decline was obvious to anyone not part of the “blue-no-matter-who” cult.
But they were ignored, slandered to the fringes, or inside their own silos. Screaming into the ether.
I’m talking Megyn Kelly, Glenn Greenwald,
, Michael Shellenberger, , and many others, you know who they are.The voices from within the corporate structure of what was once the “Mainstream” or from within the establishment, that attempted to sound the alarm were attacked brutally, criticized daily, and relentlessly discredited. The book talks about this, maybe not enough, but it’s there.
Special Council Robert Hur, the book says, “was an American success story:”
Hur had worked for years in the public sector including as a US attorney for Maryland and was now comfortably ensconced as a partner at Gibson Dunn, a white-shoe firm where he represented big clients—such as Meta and the NFL—and was finally making some money to support his wife and three kids. Hur was an American success story. He was the son of refugees from the Korean War, and his father remembered American soldiers sharing their food with him when he was a boy. Born in New York City, Hur had been taught to appreciate the greatness of America. His parents didn’t talk politics, but they told Hur and his sister to work as hard as they could. And they told him that he would go to Harvard, which he did, followed by Stanford Law School, then a clerkship for US Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist. (p. 95)
He accepted the job as the Special Counsel and had no clue who he would be Special Counsel for:
Hur’s phone rang one Friday in January 2023. It was Miller, who wanted to know if Hur would consider serving as a special counsel.
“Can you tell me anything else about it?” Hur asked.
“Not really.”
“There isn’t anything else you can tell me about the investigation? Who’s being investigated?”
“A senior government official,” Miller said.
Hur asked for the weekend. He discussed it with his wife, Cara. They speculated that it was some undersecretary of the Interior in trouble for an improper flight or something. A quick and easy matter.
On Monday, he called Miller back. “I’m inclined to do it,” he told him. “But it would be helpful if you told me more about it.”
“It’s a very senior government official,” Miller said. (pp. 95-96)
“In addition to a sense of patriotic obligation, Hur felt a sense of duty toward the Justice Department, which had been caught up in some very difficult cases with politically charged dynamics.”
Fastforward a bit: the report goes public, and the character assassination begins (from the book): “The White House communications strategy was to slime Hur as an unprofessional right-wing hack, and Garland as weak—and essentially fired.”
Kamala Harris called his comments in the report, ‘“gratuitous, inaccurate, and inappropriate, the way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly politically motivated—gratuitous… [W]e should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity than what we saw.”
“Gratuitous became the word of the day for partisan Democrats.” (The old trick Tapper knows all too well.)
“Special Counsel Hur report on Biden classified documents issues contains way too many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long standing DOJ traditions,” tweeted Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder.
MSNBC anchor Ari Melber devoted a segment to the question of whether Hur was succumbing to “ageism.”
One New Republic writer raised the stakes for fellow journalists, saying, “Any news org that puts Biden’s memory in the headline is actively rewarding Hur’s bad faith and giving the Trump campaign what they want.”
On February 10, two people close to the president told Politico that Biden thought Garland hadn’t done enough to rein in Hur’s report, that “Hur went well beyond his purview and was gratuitous and misleading in his descriptions.”
Biden sources said that most of the president’s senior advisers “do not believe that the attorney general would remain in his post for a possible second term.” They added that Garland “should have demanded edits to Hur’s report, including around the descriptions of Biden’s faltering memory.”
To Garland allies, this was basically Biden publicly firing Garland, his exit date to come after the November election. The cause? He had behaved ethically.
(In front of Congress) “You could have chosen just to comment on the president’s particular recall vis-à-vis a document or a set of documents,” observed California Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff. “But you decided to go further and make a generalized statement about his memory, didn’t you?”
Hur argued that his “assessment in the report about the relevance of the president’s memory was necessary and accurate and fair. Most importantly, what I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows, and what I expect jurors would perceive and believe. I did not sanitize my explanation. Nor did I disparage the president unfairly.”
I think the Authors misquoted this exchange between Hur and Schiff. It’s a distinction without a difference, but I don’t like it when writers change quotes to make them sound better or flow easier or whatever reason. Tell me what you think (this is their only exchange I could find, and I scrolled through the entire hearing):
No. I figured it out, the Schiff quote is what Schiff said to Robert Hur directly and the Hur quote is from his opening statement at the beginning of the hearing, but when you put them together it sounds like that was Hur’s response to Schiff.
Finally, what happened to Hur:
Hur had no doubt assumed that he would just go back to Gibson Dunn once he finished his stint investigating that “undersecretary of the Interior.” But after the report came out, Hur had been roundly vilified by the Biden administration, Democratic officials, and Democratic allies in progressive media circles.
It was not unlike how the political right had treated James Comey and Robert Mueller. Law firms and corporate legal teams got the message.
Hur spent several months looking for work. (pp. 144-145) Emphasis my own.
Dean Phillips:
Congressman Dean Phillips’s grandmother was Pauline Phillips, better known by her pen name, Abigail Van Buren—the famous advice columnist behind Dear Abby.
Dean Phillips, although there were several other viable candidates trying to primary Joe for the democratic nomination (Marianne Williamson, Robert Kennedy, Jr.) Dean was the only one who was from the DC establishment, and the only one who was treated openly as a threat. The other two were attacked legally behind the scenes, but Congressman Dean Phillips was treated like a real problem.
He was also the only one attacking the most obvious issue, the one they were all complicit in covering up, his mental decline.
Throughout 2023, as the president’s speaking and walking skills seemed to visibly decline*, it was clear to Phillips that Biden’s communication problems likely indicated some cognitive issues. It was also clear that his fellow Democratic officials were in deep denial about this. “People will talk their way into beliefs,” Phillips would later say. “Even O. J. believed he didn’t do it at the end.” When Phillips pressed them, some Democrats would offer what the congressman called the “yes, but.” As in: “Yes, Biden is in decline, but can you imagine Trump winning?” (p. 120)
*It was sooner. His visible decline was there my first time seeing him during the 2020 debates. Oh, not to mention, “You ain’t black!”
Phillips believed that Trump would win if Biden was the nominee. We’ll never know for sure if he was right but what we do know for sure, Kamala Harris wasn’t the one. I know they say she started too late in the season, but other countries spend just a few months on election season. No where else in the world are the leaders and representatives of the country perpetually running year-round for the next election season, like we do here.
Canada’s election season is limited to minimum of 37 days, max of 51.
Only in America is election season an entertainment spectacle used to boost ratings.
A way for campaigns to drain money from the people, networks to sell ads, and news. I know this, I participate, the election season is like March Madness for me.
Anyways, Dean Phillips sees Joe Biden is declining, physically and cognitively, he begins to seek out a competitor to primary Biden, for fear of Donald Trump winning, who he believed was an existential threat. If he didn’t find anyone he would have to do it himself, which he doesn’t want to do.
In July 2022, WCCO’s Chad Hartman asked Phillips if he wanted Biden to run for reelection in 2024. “No, I don’t,” Phillips told the radio host. “I think the country would be well served by a new generation of compelling, well-prepared, dynamic Democrats who step up.” (p. 121)
Before trying to run himself, he first tried to push the leading Democrats into running, to no avail.
“[a] day before appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, Phillips called House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and the White House to give them a heads-up that he would be making a call for a competitive Democratic primary.”
White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients called him “insane” for what “he was about to do.”
Phillips requested to talk to the president, Jeff Zients said, “that’s not going to happen.”
Acknowledging that he would consider running, first he wanted a primary to see if there was a better contender out there. He was very complimentary to Biden. Couldn’t have said it sweeter.
Phillips went on NBC’s Meet the Press and said he would like to see “Joe Biden, a wonderful and remarkable man, pass the torch, cement this extraordinary legacy.” His preference for another Democratic presidential candidate, he said, would be “a moderate governor, hopefully from the heartland, from one of the four states that Democrats will need.” (p. 121)
Unfortunately, the niceties didn’t carry over to the corporate media fanatics.
He opened the show with “Biden currently faces just two minor democratic challengers. Robert Kennedy, Jr (I was surprised he said his name) has a famous name…” “Lawyer…” “…Vaccine skeptic whose candidacy has been boosted by Steve Bannon (El Diablo!) and financed in part by *MAGA donors, believe it or not.”
*What Chuck meant to say is some Americans supported him.
“Marianne Williamson” is a “self-help author and was on the debate stage briefly in 2020.”*
*He means she’s not serious.
“And Cornell West…” “…Green Party…” “…taking votes from the left…”
From this moment Dean Phillips became the enemy.
Back in 2016, when Bernie Sanders would complain about the extent to which the process was rigged, with the DNC making it difficult to challenge Hillary Clinton, Phillips thought he was just being a sore loser. When Marianne Williamson, another outsider Democratic candidate, would complain about being shut out of the process in 2020, Phillips would deride her. But now he came to see what they had meant. (pp. 122-123)
That was the end of the conversation—and the beginning of an effort by the Democratic establishment to exclude Phillips from the process as much as they could. Every White House pressures its party establishment to make things harder for potential challengers, but members of the Biden team tested and pushed those boundaries.
They did their best to pretend Dean Phillips didn’t exist.
The DNC subverted the primaries to land more in Biden’s favor. Because Biden won South Carolina and had a lot of support there the DNC changed the calendar to make the South Carolina primary the first one scheduled which has never been done.
In 2020, Biden had come in fourth in Iowa, fifth in New Hampshire, second in Nevada, and first in South Carolina, where he had deep appeal with older Black voters. Without looping in other Democratic Party leaders, Biden unilaterally called for making South Carolina the first state contest.
Listen to their reasoning for this, publicly:
Clyburn (South Carolina Congressman who “didn’t ask for his state to be first”) admitted later that the White House did it to protect Biden from “embarrassment.”
Biden framed his decision as about lifting underrepresented Black voices and suggested that anyone who questioned it—including Phillips—was undermining Black voters, even racist. That claim was undercut by the fact that he called for the calendar change to be for only one presidential cycle—the one he was running in—and the calendar would be revisited in 2028.
Internally, however:
Internally at the White House and the DNC, aides privately admitted that the main motivation was helping Joe Biden, not uplifting Black voters.
The DNC also made clear that there would be no party-sanctioned debates, challengers notwithstanding.
It was machine-style politics to ensure that Biden would be the nominee, even as millions of Democratic voters were making plain their serious concerns about his ability to do the job.
The Democratic Party of Wisconsin and its chair, Ben Wikler, refused to recognize Phillips as a candidate.
Phillips had to sue all the way up to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled that he should be included on the ballot.
This is what every challenger of Biden faced. Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, a very wealthy tech entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, spent hundreds of millions of dollars of her own money fighting the hundreds of lawsuits that were thrown at them by the party establishment, and that was just for challenging him.
Dean Phillips treatment was unprecedented, unbelievable, authoritarian, and undemocratic. And he only got a fraction of the attack that RFK, Marianne Williamson, and others received.
It turned Bobby Kennedy, lifelong Democrat and champion of the environment to join Donald Trump on the campaign trail.
Everyone should listen to the speech below. I followed the story he tells as it happened. It contains no lies!
The Question we are all Looking for the Answer to, “Who was running our Country?”
wrote in his final article of 2024:
WHO’S RUNNING THE COUNTRY? In what may be the most ambitious coverup of the modern era, Joe Biden withdrew as candidate for re-election without a clear explanation of why (“I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down”), technically remained president despite obvious unfitness and non-engagement, yet his White House to this day has escaped questions about who’s making executive decisions. We now know America hasn’t had a functioning president for at least this year and probably longer, which means someone other than the president has been making presidential decisions.
What few queries that have come in about this have been met with chiding disapproval by the White House, which issued verbal whacks of rolled-up newspaper. A conspicuous example was an exchange between James Rosen and National Security Spokesman John Kirby in an August 26th gaggle. “Who’s running the country?” Rosen asked, at the beginning of a two-week Biden vacation. “Is he a ceremonial figure in some sense at this point?”
“You know better than that,” Kirby snapped. “I mean, my goodness, he talked to Prime Minister Modi today… He monitored in real time what was going on over the weekend. I mean, come on.” Somehow answers like this were good enough for most people in Washington.
The Wall Street Journal, perhaps the only major press organization to commit resources to the question, ran a series of stories noting that as far back as October, 2021, former Majority leader Nancy Pelosi had to grab a microphone away from Biden in the middle of a speech to Congressional Democrats explaining a $1 trillion infrastructure bill. That debacle marked Biden’s last such meeting with his own party’s caucus.
Biden aides were instructed not to show him negative news articles about himself, and told the Journal that national security meetings as far back as 2021 were sometimes canceled on Biden’s “bad days.” These scattered tales come from unnamed sources, and unraveling how this almost certainly illegal Weekend at Bernie’s illusion was maintained by the entire White House across the years will be a major task for incoming officials, prosecutors, and future historians.
This scandal notably required the active cooperation of nearly every reporter with a White House pass. Worse, the security and policy disaster is ongoing. We still have nearly a month to go in a tense foreign policy environment, and the public has essentially been told to stop asking who gets the call if missiles start flying. Is it Kirby? Pelosi (doubtful)? Jake Sullivan? Jill Biden? Barack Obama?
The White House has been brazen in all this, not even bothering to prop up recently defeated Kamala Harris as its putative executive (she and husband Doug Emhoff bugged out to a $7 million Hawaiian retreat after Election night, not even pretending to remain involved).
America has seen incredible political deceptions in its past, from the Gulf of Tonkin to WMDs, but this real-world Dave script involves someone not named Biden steering presidential authority to approve billions for shooting wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, while handing out pardons in record numbers, among God knows how many other things. Is there even a word for fraud on that scale? A lot of people need to go to jail behind this caper.
It’s funny. You could read that instead of this book and be totally caught up. However, it is nice to know everything it looked like it was, yes, it really was. Who was running our country? NOT, Joe Biden.
Matt Taibbi wrote this and published it before new year’s, 2024. He doesn’t have a White House press pass, or CNN backing him, all he has is what he has built himself in his little independent Substack
. And the paragraph above is more scathing, and more complete than two veteran reporters with a book deal and access to the White House could do.Outlined above is a stolen presidency, covered up by an internationalist cabinet of neoliberal war hawks secretly running the country, while White House Aides, Jill Biden, and various friends and representatives of the president were at the controls.
Controlling the world with the push of a button and the slide of a pen. Praying to God the ship stays on course, and they keep their jobs.
Just look at Kirby, the guy is terrified!
While the public stands by yelling as loud as they can that “the emperor has no clothes!!!”
And they just smile and wave, smile and wave, smile and wave….
Farewell Joe, farewell.
Thank you for reading. This is
Editor-in-Chief at