"[T]he younger Mr. Biden named names, unleashing a profane tirade against a host of perceived enemies, including..."

"... the senior Biden aide Anita Dunn; the Democratic éminences grises David Axelrod and James Carville; the Obama administration alumni who built Crooked Media, a booming liberal podcast network; the CNN host Jake Tapper; and the actor George Clooney.... ... Mr. Biden dismissed Mr. Clooney as 'a brand' and Mr. Carville as someone who 'hasn’t run a race in 40 years.' Mr. Axelrod, he said, 'had one success in his political life, and that was Barack Obama, and that was because of Barack Obama.' The former Obama aides behind Crooked Media and its 'Pod Save America' flagship, he said, were 'four white millionaires that are dining out on their association with Barack Obama from 16 years ago.' And he asserted that Ms. Dunn, who ran the White House press operation throughout most of Mr. Biden’s presidency, had made '$40 to $50 million' from the Democratic Party.... Mr. Biden saved perhaps his strongest venom for Mr. Tapper.... 'What influence does Jake Tapper have over anything? He has the smallest audience on cable news'..."

From "Hunter Biden Trashes Democrats He Saw as Betraying His Father/In a profane tirade, the former president’s son sought to settle scores with Anita Dunn, David Axelrod, James Carville and George Clooney. Among others" (NYT).

I put the video up last night, in this post. There, I highlighted Hunter's assertion that his father's problem during his debate with Trump was the drug Ambien. What I'm highlighting in this second post is Hunter's naming and blaming a lot of Democrats. 

Responses from the Democrats Hunter named:

Axelrod: "Never have the words ‘no comment’ been more appropriate."

Carville: "[The Bidens] got into this frenzy that they were these people who were disrespected and that’s their whole culture."

Tommy Vietor, a “Pod Save America” co-host: "It’s good to see that Hunter has taken some time to process the election, look inward, and hold himself accountable for how his family’s insular, dare I say arrogant at times, approach to politics led to this catastrophic outcome we’re all now living with." 

Joe Biden speaks to the press — a bit mumblingly — for 3 1/2 minutes.

"You can see that I'm mentally incompetent, I can't walk," he wisecracks. "And I could beat the hell out of both of them," he says — about Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, the co-authors of that book about Biden's decline.

Another addition to the list of quotes of Biden threatening to or bragging about beating somebody up — "If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him," etc.

By the way, I'm seeing reports that Tapper's book — despite the onslaught of publicity — isn't doing very well. I know I won't buy it. I think he shouldn't be rewarded for sitting on the information, apparently in the hope of helping Democrats win the election, and now trying to profit from revealing it. And it's absurd the way he's been going around acting as though he has just learned that journalists ought to do journalism and report events as they happen without toadying to the powerful.

AND: Why does Biden lean into the faces of female reporters? I think it's a grandpa move that has worked to delight little girls. The femaleness of the reporters makes them more like little girls to him than like what they are, adults engaged in professional work. He can't help it, just like he can't help threatening to "beat the hell out of" male antagonists. 

"But I think the meta text of why it was so shocking was all of the people that were waved off as conspiracy theorists. Right wing fever swamp people were completely right."

"Were a hundred percent right. They were completely right. And the people who, you know, even now, you know, you still hope they're telling the truth. Like maybe we can trust some of what they say they were this profoundly wrong. I think that is like the, the deeper layer of the shock."

Says Bari Weiss, somewhat babblingly. 

Jake Tapper, who has more reason to babble, speaks eloquently:

"Their joke was about my 15-year-old son, 'Oh, how does he feel about minorities?' Like the idea that he wants to be a policeman, therefore he’s, he’s racist, my son."

"And like, you know, that was the big laugh. And then I got dragged in the comments and all that stuff and, and I thought to myself, 'This is why you fuckers are losing elections'.... He’s 15. He thinks about World War II and gaming and playing linebacker, that’s his world. You’re deciding he’s a racist because he wants to be a cop. And why does he want to be a cop? He wants to be a cop because he wants to help people, you know, and he thinks that’s the best way he can help people. And that’s how the Democratic Party talks to men, not just white men, but men."

Said Jake Tapper, quoted in "Jake Tapper Says Liberal Podcaster Made Racism Jab After He Revealed Son Wants To Be a Cop: 'This Is Why You F**kers Are Losing Elections'" (Mediaite).

"The book has also amplified debate about whether more blame should be placed on Democratic leaders, Mr. Biden’s staff and the press for not revealing more about the former president earlier...."

"Intentionally or not, by being an author of a major book on the subject, Mr. Tapper has allowed himself to become a symbol of the establishment press that conservatives have long accused of hiding the former president’s frailty from the public. [Megyn] Kelly, the former Fox News star, subjected Mr. Tapper to intense grilling on her popular podcast in an interview that went viral online. 'You covered the Biden presidency aggressively throughout the four years, and you didn’t cover mental acuity, hardly at all,' Ms. Kelly said at one point. 'I mean, time and time again when issues came up, you seem to be running cover for the president.' Mr. Tapper denied the charges. 'Conservative media absolutely has every right to say, "We were hip to this, and the legacy media was not,"' he said later in the interview. 'Now, I do not accept that I was part of a cover-up. I do not accept that I was just providing cover for Joe Biden.'"

From "Everyone Now Has an Opinion on Jake Tapper/A book the CNN host co-wrote has received positive reviews and appears to be a sales hit. But it has also generated intense scrutiny of him and his work" (NYT).

So... you weren't "hip to this."

Why not? And why would I read a book written by such an out-of-touch, unobservant, slow learner? Or should I ask why would I read a book written by such a liar?

Megyn Kelly corners Jake Tapper, who only apologizes for supposedly not noticing Joe Biden's decline...

... but it looks far more likely that he saw but chose to be part of the coverup:

"Of course, I've said I I look back at my coverage with humility and and uh I wish I did cover the issues of age and acuity but I wish I had covered them much more and I wish I mean of course..."

Watch the whole video, please, and see how Jake Tapper treated Lara Trump when she was a guest on his show on October 18, 2020. Kelly shows the video clip in which Lara Trump called attention to Biden's lack of mental acuity — the subject of Tapper's new book — and Tapper accused her of mocking Biden's stutter.

Watch Tapper's face and listen to his voice as he berates her for her lack of empathy. That's very effective on many women. Not on Lara Trump, but on many women, including many viewers of Tapper's show, and I presume he knows it. You can do a lot of subordinating of women by stimulating our fear that we may be regarded as unkind. 

"Don't news people have to tell you what they know when they find it out?"

"Isn't that the difference between news and a secret?"

.@jonstewart is getting whiplash watching CNN pivot from promoting Jake Tapper's "bombshell" book to lamenting Joe Biden's cancer diagnosis pic.twitter.com/pShybi5F6e

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) May 20, 2025

"Plenty of Democrats are annoyed that 'Original Sin' has catapulted the issue of Biden’s enfeeblement back into the news..."

"... threatening to distract voters from Donald Trump’s rococo corruption. I think, though, that Tapper and Thompson have done the party a favor. Some sort of reckoning is due for the disastrous missteps that paved the way for Trump’s return.... Party officials burned a lot of credibility defending Biden’s cognitive fitness. As they seek to earn it back, they should be honest about what they got wrong. Politically, the easiest move for Democrats is to dump all the blame onto Biden, his family and the clique of longtime aides Tapper and Thompson call 'the Politburo': Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed. This group certainly deserves to be excoriated.... But while his closest associates might have hidden the worst of erosion, it was plain enough to anyone willing to see it. Again and again, voters told pollsters that the president was too old to run for re-election. If ordinary people recognized the problem, why couldn’t the insiders?"

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "How Did So Many Elected Democrats Miss Biden’s Infirmity?" (NYT).

I don't know what "sort of reckoning" you're going to get if you keep saying "too old" when you mean mentally deficient and when you ask why couldn’t the insiders "recognize the problem" when you can't see inside the insiders' head.

I don't think you yourself are recognizing the problem when you say the problem was that he was "too old" and when you portray the insiders as sincerely failing to see what was there. If they saw that he was quite old, they could nevertheless believe that he was an old one with excellent capacities.

But I'd guess that they knew he lacked capacity, and I wonder if the reason they didn't recognize that problem is that Joe Biden has lacked capacity all along — including when he ran in 1988 — and the insiders were always operating through him and didn't particularly need or want him to have what it takes to serve as President.

So if you want a serious reckoning, reckon with that. But you don't, do you? You didn't then, and you don't now. You're just hoping Trump will fail so badly, that the much-abused people will come stumbling back to you in the end because there's nowhere else to go. 

I don't want to read a Clooney-centric account of how the Democrats allowed Joe Biden to win the nomination and then swiped it from him.

The New Yorker has this excerpt from Jake Tapper's new book: "How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump/At a fateful event last summer, Barack Obama, George Clooney, and others were stunned by Biden’s weakness and confusion. Why did he and his advisers decide to conceal his condition from the public and campaign for reëlection?"

I bailed early, preferring to interact with Grok. My prompts, exactly as I wrote them, presented in order and with zero Grok-written material:

1. Summarize this article: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-political-scene/how-joe-biden-handed-the-presidency-to-donald-trump

2. I skimmed it and it seemed so Clooney-focused it put me off

3. I'd like a critical perspective on the piece that is skeptical of this interest in Clooney. I don't care to read a step by step story of what happened as Biden got excluded from the nomination he won in the primaries. I want much more skepticism about the way the Democratic Party allowed him to win the nomination in the first place and got itself into the seeming (or bullshit) jam it was in last summer

4. Did Democrats engineer a nomination for Harris that she couldn't have won in a fair primary or did Democrats accidentally wait too long to lose hope in Biden and find themselves in the position where they couldn't avoid giving it to Harris? And how did the mainstream media contribute to the problem?

5. Make a clear and concise list of why Tapper's going Clooney-centric exemplifies what's wrong with mainstream media politics and with the Democratic Party

I've spared you any material written by Grok, because I presume you don't want to read what was written without a human mind. But I think what Grok wrote is more useful than what's in The New Yorker.

In case you want to read how the machine reacted to my prompts, here's the link.

"Biden's physical deterioration — most apparent in his halting walk — had become so severe that there were internal discussions about putting the president in a wheelchair, but they couldn't do so until after the election."

Write Jake Tapper and Thompson in a book they call "Original Sin," quoted in "Exclusive: Biden aides discussed wheelchair use if he were re-elected, new book says" (Axios).

The book will be out in a week, so presumably Axios can excerpt anything from the text and call it "exclusive."

Nothing wrong with needing a wheelchair while serving in government. Obviously, Franklin Roosevelt did it, but he also hid it. What's up with the shame? What does it say to people with disabilities to hide your need for a wheelchair? How can it be better to walk in a "halting" style and to risk falling? Was he in pain? Was he on painkillers?

It might be Bad Analogy Day on this blog — see the previous post — so I'll say it: It reminds me of a gay person in the closet. The hiding expresses shame that hurts others in your group and that underestimates the intelligence and empathy of those you're hiding from. Is that a bad analogy?

Speaking of things not done until after the election, here's Chuck Todd, denying responsibility for hiding Biden's fitness. I'm embedding this because Todd's inability to enact sincerity is so funny that I think an aspiring comic actor could use this as a model:

Who's in the worst position to write a book about the coverup of Biden's cognitive decline?

Tapper then: It's a conspiracy theory to say Biden has cognitive decline. It's a stutter.

Tapper now: A book on the cover up pic.twitter.com/UjnQXgkzFF

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 26, 2025

Here's Jake Tapper incensed over Joe Biden's "stutter" and outraged over claims of Biden's cognitive decline.

Now he's cashing in on a book about Biden's cognitive decline and media cover up. There is no bottom for these people.
pic.twitter.com/rdNdqh4YKQ

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) February 26, 2025

Jake Tapper vs. Stephen Miller.

Hi. Want to see a murder on live TV?

I give you White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller vs. Jake Tapper on CNN.

Tapper said we need illegals here to pick our crops.

Then, Fatality…

pic.twitter.com/W10tfKT2Od

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 28, 2025

"Pilloried by Democrats during his 2012 run, Romney has emerged as a strong voice for a bygone kind of politics."

Said Jake Tapper, introducing Mitt Romney on "State of the Union" yesterday.

Romney gave a long interview, and maybe you saw a clip of it, but I want to do my own edit:

ROMNEY: Donald Trump won. He won overwhelmingly. He said what he was going to do, and that's what he's doing. I mean, people are saying, oh, I don't like this appointment or this policy that he's talking about. But those are the things he said he was going to do when he ran. So you can't complain about someone who does what he said he was going to do. And I agree with him on a lot of policy fronts. I disagree with him on some things. But it's like, OK, give him a chance to do what he said he's going to do and see how it works out.... 

TAPPER:  Are you worried at all about being a target for retribution, you or members of your family?

ROMNEY: No, actually, I have been pretty clean throughout my life. I'm not particularly worried about criminal investigations.

JD Vance versus Jake Tapper.

NEW: JD Vance shuts down a very emotional Jake Tapper over CNN’s constant coverage of hoaxes.

Tapper, who was very emotional throughout the interview, sat as Vance roasted CNN for their biased coverage.

Vance: Ask yourself a basic question about network integrity. You guys… pic.twitter.com/0Ce84sWrH3

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 27, 2024

And this montage works as a fact-check on Tapper:

 

BREAKING: JD Vance called out Fake Tapper for the lies he pushed about Russiagate earlier this morning

Tapper denied telling any lies

So here are 3.5 minutes of Jake Tapper spreading Russiagate conspiracy theory pic.twitter.com/qeiFMtimx9

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) October 27, 2024

"The intentionally repulsive color won over the internet, and then the summer, and then, at a pivotal moment, an entire presidential campaign."

"In a few short days, supporters of Vice President Kamala Harris, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, memed chartreuse into an unusually potent political symbol.... 'I will aspire to be Brat,' Jake Tapper said on CNN to one of his correspondents, who had been holding up a slime-green meme printed out on a sheet of paper."

From "You Can’t Escape This Color/'This is not millennial pink. The energy behind it is alive'" (NYT)(free-access link).

I used the last of this month's NYT gift link allowance on that article. Why? Because I knew it was hard to understand without more explanation, but I didn't want to do the explanation.

And you'll need to go over there anyway to see the particular green in question. It's a color that's connected to this word "brat," which reminds me of a word from many years ago when I was a teenager: "groovy." It was new and cool and precisely expressive of youth for a very short time before it got seized upon by everyone old and it became embarrassing. 

From the golden moment before the collapse of "groovy":

Once the TV talking heads and political candidates start using your word, they've stolen it from you. You have to move on or use it ironically or do whatever it is you kids do today when the adults are annoying you. 

As for you political candidates, be careful using the word "brat" in Wisconsin. I remember when John Kerry screwed up.

"It’s true that the format did Biden no favors. CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash avoided fact-checking..."

"... like it was the plague, which allowed Trump to steamroll an unsteady Biden with his usual stream of lies. Trump served up whoppers about abortion, his bungled covid response, Charlottesville, January 6, and more.... CNN finally ran an on-air fact-check of Trump more than an hour after the debate ended. But considering the relatively minuscule size of the audience at that late hour and the fact Trump was allowed to lie with impunity on the same network at length earlier in the evening, CNN’s belated attempt at basic journalistic accountability was worth very little."

Writes Aaron Rupar, in "Not great, Joe/Biden's debate showing stunk up the joint. But don't give up hope" (PublicNotice).

The format did Biden no favors? The format was engineered to favor Biden! Trump stepped up and did it the way Biden's people wanted. If the format chosen imposed disadvantages on Biden, it's only because his people thought other formats were more disadvantageous... unless the fix was in and the idea was to expose Biden's weaknesses.

Rupar, of course, is ridiculous. The "whopper about... Charlottesville" came from Biden. Who is still bitterly clinging to the notion that Trump said Nazis were fine people? Maybe Biden is so far gone that he actually believes it, but I don't believe Rupar believes it. I'm crediting him with rank cynicism. If the CNN moderators had been fact-checking in real time, they would have had to correct Biden on the "fine people" hoax... and on numerous other things, such as the claim that Trump told people to inject bleach into their arm. But Rupar is free to imagine that the moderators would have fact-checked in a biased way, a la Candy Crowley, and to pine about the debate that might have been.

CORRECTION: When first published, this post had a few stray sentences of Rupar's — at the bottom, after a big space — and I hope no one mistook that as mine! 

"He has remade the party in his image. There are still some Republicans who are trying to take it away — like, take it back. That's over. There's no back."

CNN's Tapper: Trump Has Reformed the GOP with More Working Class People, Including Voters of Color, Men Primarily

TAPPER: “You‘re talking about how he is reforming the Republican Party more working class people, including voters of color, African American, men primarily, but… pic.twitter.com/Oup02acSSl

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 6, 2024

Gavin Newsom is enjoying Nikki Haley and wishes her luck.

Newsom's speech is layered with sincerity and sarcasm that feels really funny and slimy to me (and I like when Jake Tapper jumps in to say that polls suggest Nikki would "clean Biden's clock"):

Democrat Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) praises Republican Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) for working for the Democrats to undermine Trump: “She’s one of our better surrogates.” WATCH pic.twitter.com/aB2aYwWNcJ

— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) February 24, 2024

Language note:

Jake Tapper's "14-year-old daughter, Alice, almost died as a result of a misdiagnosis."

And if you missed it, here's Alice's experience, in her own words:https://t.co/D7qbOctgjd

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) December 16, 2022

"Since Michael Avenatti has been sentenced to 14 more years in jail...."

Since Michael Avenatti has been sentenced to 14 more years in jail, I am once again obligated to remind the internet of the time Ana Navarro compared him to the Holy Spirit.
pic.twitter.com/y63JoXlW5Y

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 5, 2022

He was once God on Earth, and now.... But look how happy he made Jake Tapper:

Look how happy Jake Tapper looked while talking about Michael Avenatti running for president. pic.twitter.com/WmjLnq4wKi

— 🇺🇸 PapaCap 🇺🇸 (@bsmitch007) June 2, 2022