Jake Tapper's Biden Book is Hilarious and Insane

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's mass media apologia is leaps and bounds more demented than the book's subject, Joe Biden

It was this guy’s fault!

I wasn’t going to do it, really. After stepping to the edge of nervous collapse of late, I promised, no more Conventional Wisdom Bestsellers. I saw Abundance in an airport and turned away before registering cover art. I had the same plan for Original Sin, the “controversial” book in which CNN’s Jake Tapper teams with Alex Thompson of Axios to get real about the media and Joe Biden’s health. One moment of late-night weakness later, I was reading from Chapter One, “He Totally Fucked Us”:

No one thought that the Harris campaign had been without error. But for the most knowledgeable Democratic officials and donors, and for top members of the Harris campaign, there was no question about the father of this election calamity: It was Joe Biden. Harris, loyal to Biden to a fault, might never say such a thing. But plenty of people around her would… “We got so screwed by Biden as a party,” David Plouffe, who helped run the Harris campaign, told us.. Harris, he said, was a “great soldier,” but the compressed 107-day race was “a fucking nightmare.”

“And it’s all Biden,” Plouffe said. Referring to Biden’s decision to run for reelection, then wait more than three weeks to bow out, Plouffe added: “He totally fucked us.”

Holy catfish! I thought from online buzz that Original Sin was a mea culpa. It would own press failures to cover Joe Biden’s infirmity in a super-belated version of Canadian comic Bruce McCullough’s “I’m sorry I caused all that cancer” routine. But Original Sin isn’t that. It’s much crazier! Instead of a dreary and predictable book-length excuse for thousands of media professionals simultaneously whiffing on the most obvious story in history, it’s an ambitious book-length effort to absolve all concerned, pin an industry’s coverage mistake on its President Droolcup subject (a gambit many times ballsier than blaming one reporter, à la Judith Miller), all while additionally swirling a new storm system of bullshit storylines to delay more serious questions about things like who was just president for four years.

It’s the opposite of a mea culpa and the literary degree of difficulty is awesome, equivalent to a blind unicyclist trying to juggle six chainsaws. Do Jake and Alex pull it off? They don’t! But they sure leave a hell of a lot of blood on stage: