How many big-name reporters does it take to tell you three months from now what they finally admitted last summer and that you had figured out almost five years ago?
Two. Their names are Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.
Set for release on May 20 by PenguinRandomHouse, the CNN anchor and the Axios correspondent are writing a tell-all (not really, but I'll return to that) titled, "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again."
I love this bit from the promotional page: "From two of America’s most respected journalists, an unflinching and explosive reckoning with one of the most fateful decisions in American political history: Joe Biden’s run for reelection despite evidence of his serious decline—amid desperate efforts to hide the extent of that deterioration."
How desperate was the White House, really, when they had the legacy media helping them out until Biden's drooling debate appearance made it impossible to carry on?
"So now they'll tell us?" I quipped to Karol Markowicz on X.
Notice, please, that Karol wrote that it's "the entire media strategy."
"Media," rather than "news industry."
Because reporting the news from 2020 in 2025 isn't news at all.
"This should END the media. This should END Jake Tapper’s career," Amy Curtis wrote — and she's right. Tapper and the rest of the legacy media were complicit in the biggest coverup in history, that the most powerful man in the world was someone else's puppet.
And yet Tapper — unlike you or me, gentle reader — was taken aback (or at least lied his a** off and pretended to be) by how poorly Biden performed during that Jun 27 presidential debate.
“We had these little iPads in front, so we could communicate with the control room. And yeah, within the first few moments I wrote, ‘Holy smokes,’” Tapper shared. As Meyers threw him a wry look following Tapper’s clean language, the journalist replied, “I didn’t know who was going to be back in the control room. I had to keep it clean.”
But as far as his shock, Tapper didn’t think he was alone in feeling that way: “That was kind of the national reaction.”
The only people who were shocked were people who relied on Tapper and outlets like CNN to report honestly on Biden's condition. PJ Media readers knew. Townhall readers knew. The only thing that shocked me about Biden's debate performance is what a crappy job Dr. Feelgood had done of juicing him up for it. I'd noted on more than one occasion that Biden was usually good for up to an hour, but then quickly faded after that. On debate night, he came out at the start like he'd already been at it for an hour.
Give some credit to Thompson, who was "one of a small handful of reporters who was aggressively pursuing direct evidence that Biden’s age — regular fodder for political talk shows — was actually having an impact."
While I have no doubt that Tapper and Thompson have dug up some juicy new details, "Original Sin" will likely do little more than fill in the one or two remaining pieces in a puzzle that the rest of us had put together years ago.
Do you know what would be real news, what would make "Original Sin" worth your time and money? If it included the genuine tell-all story about how outlets like CNN and Axios willingly participated in the White House's attempted coverup. If Tapper and Thompson tell that story — and tell it as a media-wide mea culpa — then I'll apologize for every mean thing I've written and even thought about their upcoming book.
Finally, there's an irony in this book, one you don't even have to read it to understand — because it's right there in the last part of the title, "His Disastrous Choice to Run Again."
Choice? What choice? Joe Biden was given permission to run by the very people who could have told the truth. For a man of Biden's endless ambitions, there's no choice involved when it comes to clinging to power or grifting for dollars.
It wasn't the threat of impeachment from the Democrat-controlled House that convinced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency. It was when "Mr. Conservative" himself, Sen. Barry Goldwater, along with two other Republicans — Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott (Penn.) and House Minority Leader John Rhodes (Ariz.) — telling Nixon, point blank, he wouldn't survive a Senate vote to remove him.
The legacy media is the Democrats' essential institution, the one voice — like Goldwater once was for the GOP — whose authority they must respect. Had people like Tapper just done their damn jobs, had they honestly reported what everyone else could see, Biden would have had no choice whether to run again.
Not having read the book yet, I have no idea whose "Original Sin" Tapper and Thompson mean. But if the sin isn't the legacy media's, then their book is likely a waste of their time and yours.
Recommended: The Atlantic Wants a ‘Liberal Tea Party’ and I Can't Stop Laughing
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