Media Still Missing the Big Story - Who Ran The Country For Four Years?

<![CDATA[Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's book on the Biden administration, Original Sin, is out this week, and with it, media falling all over themselves to excuse away their culpability in minimizing what 80% of the country, reflected in polling, saw in Joe Biden - He was too old and infirm to serve another four years as president. From the basement campaign Biden ran in 2020, Ed Morrissey and I would comment weekly that the former President had lost at least a step, or if you're a baseball fan, 10 miles an hour off his fastball, just from four years earlier when he was Barack Obama's Vice-President. This is despite all the policy differences with which we always criticized, or the fact that Joe Biden, as Ed often put it, was rhetorically 20 pounds of bull excrement in a 10-pound bag when it came to self-aggrandizement. The point is we knew he was slipping then. It didn't matter. COVID, the lockdowns, the chaos of the economic collapse and job losses were too much for Donald Trump to overcome, and voters very narrowly chose Biden in the hopes he would return the country to normalcy. Only 42,000 between three states determined the outcome of the election, and you have to wonder how much media coverage, or non-coverage as the case may be, had an impact. Beltway media had a hand on the scale from the time Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016. Tapper's proposition in Original Sin is that the White House and elected Democrats lied to him. For the moment, let's give him his premise. From the time the transition period began with then-President-Elect Trump, the narrative of Russiagate began to take shape like a hurricane forming in the Atlantic. It gathered strength, because the Democrats lied to media, and media bought the lie, hook, line, and sinker. Here's Tapper talking about it as if the Russia dossier and story was verifiably true.]]>