I’m not sure what the point is of reading Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” I mean, we lived through it, and, of course, outlets like PJ Media asked questions about Joe Biden’s cognitive and physical health for years that the left is finally acknowledging.
Besides, I dwell in politics for a living. When I read after hours, I generally want to get away from the news.
Nevertheless, people are reading “Original Sin.” It’s a hot seller that’s demanding a massive chunk of media attention. One columnist has taken to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to point out that one key factor in Biden’s decline, its cover-up, and his disastrous choice to run again is all but missing in the book: Biden’s foreign policy team.
In an op-ed from Monday, Walter Russell Mead writes:
The most remarkable thing about “Original Sin” to this reader was the near-total absence of President Biden’s foreign-policy team from the account. This isn’t because they weren’t around or in the know. Messrs. Tapper and Thompson emphasize that both Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan had better and more regular access to the increasingly walled-off president than any other cabinet secretaries or senior aides beyond the inner ring of Biden loyalists that the authors call the Politburo. We also know from many sources that European leaders were worried and puzzled by Mr. Biden’s irregular behavior at international meetings. Yet “Original Sin” focuses much less scrutiny on Mr. Biden’s foreign policy team’s actions and omissions than on those of his domestic advisers.
Mead gives Team Biden a sliver of benefit of the doubt:
There are good reasons why the foreign-policy team might have rallied around an ailing president. Mr. Biden reserved much of his fading energy for foreign policy and likely was more effective in foreign-policy staff meetings than in meetings on other topics. And if you are a presidential adviser, you might not think that patriotism required you to broadcast a leader’s failings to the world. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s advisers kept their lips tightly sealed in 1944 and 1945; perhaps Mr. Biden’s closest staffers chose to follow their example.
On that last point, I would push back that the left-wing establishment doesn’t do anything out of patriotism.
Flashback: WH Insiders Reportedly Aren't Sure How Involved Joe Biden Is in Decision-Making
Mead asserts that Tapper and Thompson believe that Biden’s cognitive issues allowed the radicals to run roughshod over domestic policy, enacting policies that he wouldn’t have allowed or at least might have watered down had he been more coherent. Mead also claims that Biden was more interested in foreign policy; therefore, he applied what little mental energy he had to that arena.
“At the time it seemed to me that Mr. Biden’s intellectual fingerprints were all over foreign policy — that the aides and officials devising and implementing policy were staying within Mr. Biden’s red lines, conforming to his instinctive preferences, and giving us a genuinely Bidenesque policy,” Mead writes.
This comports with former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ famous comment that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Biden’s foreign policy consisted of blunder after blunder, so it’s not the least bit surprising that it bore his hapless stamp.
We knew before the 2020 election that a Biden presidency would be a disaster. What we didn’t know was that the media would cover up the president’s mental and physical deterioration to such a degree. And now we’re beginning to see how so many people failed us by propping up the lie that the president was in full control of his faculties.
“It's not just about politics, it's not just about history, political science, controversy. It's about morality,” said Dr. Albert Mohler on his podcast on Wednesday morning. “Covering up a president's cognitive decline is a moral failure.”
Mohler added that “when you have a cover-up like this, it puts the entire nation in danger.
A fully coherent Biden would have wreaked havoc on this nation’s domestic and foreign policy, but the Joe Biden we got was much worse. Thank God we survived Biden’s four years and were able to put our country back on the right track.
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