A few years ago Hu Jintao, Xi’s predecessor as General Secretary of the CCP, was publicly escorted out of the closing ceremony of the 20th National Congress. He was purged by Xi and in a manner that ensured everyone knew about it.
That’s the best way to think of Jake Tapper’s book regarding the mental decline of Joe Biden. This is a purge in the form of book, launched by multiple factions of the DC governing class, targeted at removing Joe Biden. A faction fight masquerading as a public cleansing.
The question is who ordered the purge? Tapper wrote the words in the book and he’ll get the royalties but he’s not the one wrote the story.
Who were Tapper’s Mark Felts?
Joe Biden has been one of the most toxic people in American political life for the past 50 years. Behind the public image of Scranton Joe and the guy who took the train back home to Delaware from DC every night was a one of the more ruthless and certainly unethical politicians in a town full of them.
Those traits became apparent when he first came to the national spotlight in 1987 when he launched what amounted to a public witch trial during the Bork SCOTUS confirmation hearings after promising not to do so. That was an act that has poisoned our politics to this day. Why did he do it? Because he was trying to rescue a dying presidential run, his first of three.
Three presidential runs. Passed over in 2016 as Obama’s designated successor despite being his vice president.
Well, he got the nomination in March, 2020 when the DNC cleared the primary field for him. One reason was that he was not Bernie Sanders and the Democrats could probably win in November with Biden. The other reason became clear within the first days of his presidency: that, in exchange for getting his lifelong ambition for the White House fulfilled, Biden would agree to be the front man for what amounted to a Mafia bust-out by the Left in controlling the government.
Scranton Joe, the Catholic Joe Everyman, suddenly embraced every far-Left cause in existence. Trillions in new spending, the Green New Deal, open immigration. Then there were the culture wars. The weaponization of the government against political opponents, the embrace of the evil of DEI, and the making of LGBT+ a centerpiece of American foreign policy (which resulted in that iconic picture of the Pride flag flying over our embassy in Kabul).
The embrace of LGBT+ went as far as having bare-breasted transvestites prancing on the White House grounds. Nice.
In short, it was a useful partnership. The recent controversy regarding the use of the autopen in the Biden administration is sort of moot. The Left in its various institutions (media, government, higher ed) agreed to look the other way in regard to the various Biden family sins, such as the millions of dollars in foreign bribes, and regarding Biden’s personal decrepitude, because Biden was going to sign everything put in front of him.
Then Biden broke the deal.
The partnership began to fray, not last June after the CNN debate, but the year previous when Biden announced he was going to run again. The deal in March 2020 when he was handed the nomination was that he would be a one-term president; it was unthinkable that he would run again, because he would have been 82 in January 2025. However, Biden, and indeed his whole family from Jim to Hunter to Jill, is at heart a grifter, and just like an Alabama tick he was dug in.
The depth of reporting in Tapper’s book, such as it is, and the speed at which it was produced, indicated that this was a group effort long-planned. People wanted to help Tapper, use Tapper, because they were going to settle scores.
Why do this, you might ask. After all, Biden is out of politics and is a non-entity. The only person on his political tree appears to be Pete Buttigieg. Don’t make me laugh.
Some have speculated that the book was a way for the Democrats to get ahead of the story of their coverage of Biden’s decline. Hardly. This book project risks making everyone look bad. (Note that we are in a much different political climate than when this was all hatched.)
Viewing all of this as a story, who is the person in the shadows, moving the narrative along?
Regardless, sit back and watch the show. We’ve been saying for the past five years that America was heading toward a totalitarian state. Now we have the purges to prove it.
Yep – it’s grifters and lunatics all the way down… getting ‘to the bottom of it’ will be like a drive across Texas.
Purged? Maybe. Biden was on his way out in 2020 anyway so the idea that he or his Crime Family would continue in politics was always a stretch, especially after the early death of his logical successor Beau. I’m sure Jill and Hunter at least had delusions of continuing after 2028 if he had won another term, or at least finding another Biden to grift off.
I disagree somewhat with your timeline as the Democrats obviously cleared the primary schedule in 2024 for Biden. I don’t think there was any ‘one and done’ deal. The ‘transition Presidency’ and hints he’d only serve one term were marketing to make his advanced age and obvious (even then) infirmity more palatable. It’s almost always a scapegoat that gets purged, not the people actually behind the debacle.
It will be interesting to see what happens to Harris as I think it is accurate to identify her as more of an obstacle than Biden. True to her hothouse political career in California and the post-mortems on her abortive 2020 Presidential campaign, she turned out to be entitled, lazy, and uninterested in doing any work to make herself a saleable national candidate. This pretty much forced the Democrat PTB to back Biden in a second run. If she disappears that’s definitely evidence of a purge going on.
I would also not discount that Tapper’s book is a significant amount of damage control, both for the Democrats and the news media. Scapegoating the Biden Crime Family as the main movers behind concealing Joe’s potatohead status is an obvious attempt to maintain some shreds of the credibility the DNC-adjacent media has been tearing to pieces since at least 2016, especially among true-believer Leftists who would be inclined to be mad at the old white guy for losing to Trump. That spills over into some damage control for the Democrat brand as well.
Assuming for the sake of argument that the “Obama Machine” is an ideologically coherent and driven entity. Also, that Obama himself is nothing more than a politically palatable front man, given his third rate intellect: he’s no V. I. Lenin. It seems a stretch that they could not come up with a better vessel for their ambitions than Biden. Hilary Clinton is many things but a compliant handmaiden sure ain’t one of them. Stretching credulity to accept Biden as a cat’s paw, they certainly completely underestimated the avarice and personal agendas of his “staff”, while hugely overestimating his ability to advocate for their programs. Obama is on record concerning Biden’s complete lack of competence without considering dementia so that can’t have been a surprise.
From excerpts and commentary on Tapper’s book, I’m sure not going to give him any of my money, so that’s all I’ll ever have to go on, it seems just a fairly jejune and transparent attempt for Tapper to preserve credibility. Trashing wide swaths of the Dem apparat is, depending on your point of view, either collateral damage or a happy accident. I refuse to believe it’s some sort of deep machination without any evidence of some organization operating at a level above a Three Stooges sketch.
These are great comments.
I am uncomfortable with simply accepting the current narrative(s) that this was either an attempt for Tapper to make some money/cover his tracks or a way of the Democrats getting ahead of future Biden revelations that blew up in their face
The problem with getting ahead of future Biden revelations was that a lot of air had already leaked from the balloon of that story. Any future revelations, say like the recent release of the Hur interview tapes, would be best a day or two story but could be contained.
A large part of that was the Biden administration is the past. It’s dead, the Democrats and the world at large has moved on to Trump and even the normal “what’s our future” infighting characteristic of a party that just got wiped out. Why even dig it up? Leave it in the shallow grave out by the tree line and let us never speak of it again.
Yet Tapper, of all people, has spoken about it again. Not only spoken of it but rushed a book project out there in such a manner that led me to conclude back then he had a lot of inside help in doing it. A different, perhaps poorly sourced book from a less prominent writer published six months from now would not carry the same cachet.
DC is an imperial city where there are many factions vying for favor at court. Somebody wanted this book written, why?
There are big dangers with the release of the book because they provide threads that outsiders can now pull on. Didn’t Tapper, didn’t anybody in the DC establishment and media, know what was happening? Isn’t that your job? Tapper was talking about this going back a year or two, well… wasn’t it longer?
Finally the big one, if Biden was in such bad shape who was executing the power the presidency? Keep in mind Article II states that the powers of the executive inhere in the president as a person, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” If Jill, Hunter, or John Podesta were wielding powers than we have a soft coup, a constitutional crisis.
This isn’t Edith Wilson redux. The executive powers of the president are much greater.
What Tapper’s book does, given the format and who he is, is suddenly is legitimized all what have been dismissed as MAGA conspiracy theories. Now I don’t think the Tappers, Rachel Maddows,or anybody at the NY Times really care about that on their conscience – they sold out a long time ago in the Holy War against Trump.
However the Democrats don’t control Congress or DoJ, the Republicans do and Comer has already talked about Getting Biden’s aides and doctors in to testify. Perhaps when Tapper and his backers conceived of the project they weren’t thinking that far down the line, but someone was.
So thinking further, who is the ultimate target of the book? I said Biden, but now I think it’s Obama
Let’s making sure we’re following the story, not the narrative
The people who stayed in the White House and positions of power in the administration and the people who got out early when they saw what was up are two different groups, with different long-term goals. I have nothing to offer except the suggestion that there may be something there. All those people who left in 2021-22 to take other jobs of power in DC.