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Who lost the White House? The 2024 election is being litigated all over again on dueling tours by media journalists selling books and Joe Biden trying to convince the public not to buy them.

Joe popped up on the BBC and then joined Jill on The View where he smirked and muttered his way through an interview that most of the rest of the media tried to ignore even as it focused on promoting campaign books by fellow journos like CNN’s Jake Tapper blaming Biden for 2024.

The only thing sadder than Biden trying to go on some sort of anti-campaign is watching campaign reporters pretend that his senility was some sort of great coverup that nobody could have found about rather than something that everyone who had ever seen Biden already knew.

On the way to the 2023 Restoration Weekend, I got into an Uber driven by a black lady in New Orleans. She was a Democrat and hated Trump. Her opinion of Biden was that he was, and I quote, a “dementia” case. How did she know back then what the media only figured out now?

There are two dueling conspiracy theories here.

The media’s conspiracy theory is that a secret “inner circle” (the media automatically capitalizes “Inner Circle” as if they were referring to the Freemasons rather than Jill Biden) kept Biden’s condition secret. And they illustrate their books with quotes from Democrat staffers, donors and anyone in earshot who were all able to observe what the rest of the country was about Biden.

Was it really a conspiracy if everyone already knew about it?

The other conspiracy theory, the one nearly everyone believes, was that the media knew about Biden’s condition and lied about it to protect its party until it became more politic to tell the truth.

Conspiracy theories are also cover-ups. The cover-up is over who gets the blame for 2024.

Biden can’t be blamed because he had been out to lunch since at least 2022. Kamala can’t be blamed since she’s a half-black woman and the current 2028 frontrunner. The party and its media allies can’t be blamed because, are you kidding me, they’re not going to all take the fall.

So a shadowy “inner circle” consisting of Jill Biden, Hunter’s dealer and anyone on the outs with the party gets the blame for “hiding” Biden’s condition from the media which was able to immediately connect the dots between Trump, a Russian bank and an Australian diplomat, but couldn’t possibly be asked to notice that the president didn’t seem to know where he was.

“Being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story,” Alex Thompson of Axios claimed in a speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception.”

The media didn’t miss the story. It wasn’t deceived by some mysterious “inner circle”. It lied.

In 2022, I wrote that “Biden, who insists on another term, is barely present and functioning in this one. His attention span varies wildly. He spews incoherent gibberish and lies so wildly that it’s practically a medical condition. Videos show him wandering aimlessly with staff and even a giant bunny acting as handlers for the man who is supposed to be the most powerful figure on the world stage.” I did that without being a White House correspondent, living in D.C. or even meeting Joe Biden in person. Any one of millions of other Americans could have done it too.

Thompson didn’t do it because it would have been really bad for his party. And by extension, really bad for his career. Just ask Rep. Dean Philips who ran against Biden on a platform that could be summed up as, “Are you kidding me, he’s old and senile.” Dems rewarded Philips for his courage with an FEC investigation, a smear campaign and ousting him from Congress.

The Democratic Party, not some inner circle but its most powerful machinery, cleared the way for Biden to run by intimidating all opponents inside and outside the party, filing legal challenges, lawsuits and running hate campaigns against Philips, No Labels and its key figures, who included some of the formerly most respected figures in the party, including Sen. Joe Lieberman, all to secure an undisputed nomination for a man most Dems didn’t want.

The media went along with this campaign every step of the way until that debate when a whistle was blown and suddenly the interests of the party changed and it was safe to talk about it.

Now all the collaborators want to blame some mysterious dark force for their years of lies.

Building up the inner circle of Biden family members, aides and staffers as some powerful omnipotent force gives the media an excuse for its years of lies about Biden’s competence.

According to the New York Times, Democrats suffer from “a lasting fear of speaking out” and this shadowy conspiracy is so terrifying that Tapper’s book is “reliant on anonymous sourcing — very few aides or elected officials are quoted by name — that it reveals the enduring chill that Mr. Biden’s loyalists have cast over a Democratic Party.”

The “enduring chill” that Biden’s loyalists, a group that had previously consisted of a crackhead, a community college teacher and four guys from Delaware no one had heard of before, is one explanation for a book relying on “anonymous sourcing”. The other is that it belongs in the fiction section. A third is that the anonymous Dems pretending they knew nothing… knew it all.

The excuse of a hidden inner circle is supposed to divert attention from the rest of the party and blame it all on Biden’s family members and a handful of aides, but Tapper’s book and other media reporting after the debate disaster established that a whole bunch of Democrats, elected officials, donors and staffers saw Biden in the same state that he appeared at the debate.

Like the media, they did and said nothing until they thought Biden was doomed to lose.

The biggest crime of Tapper’s book and other media campaign books of its ilk is that it can’t even manage to tell us anything that conservative media wasn’t reporting two years ago.

Shocking revelations that Biden forgot names, mixed up locations and had to be carefully walked through everything are only shocking in the same echo chamber that believed in Russiagate and Mueller. Everyone else had already seen videos of Biden nodding off at sessions with world leaders, directionlessly wandering around international forums and having to be herded off by everyone from Obama, European leaders and a giant Easter Bunny.

And the media lacks the grace to not only admit its lies but that conservatives were right.

If Biden’s condition had really been hidden by a secretive inner circle, how was every conservative writer able to comment on it over the past few years? If it was such a secret, how were a bunch of outsiders able to learn about it and report on it years before the media did?

The campaign books are as pathetically eager to discuss Biden’s diminished state as they once feverishly covered it up, but they carefully ignore all the implications. If Biden was really suffering from diminished capacity, then why not investigate whether he was really competent to hold office and who was actually running the autopen? Were his signatures even legal?

And if this “inner circle” really exists, why not hold them accountable and have them testify?

Finally, once the media deemed Biden to be incapacitated, why did they just limit themselves to demanding that he step down from the campaign, but not step down from the presidency?

The answers are so obvious that the media will never ever discuss the reasons for them.

The media shamelessly lied and is now profiting. It’s publishing the stories it wouldn’t touch before while storing them up and waiting until the time was right to cash in on them. And they’re doing it to protect their reputations, the reputation of their party and of Kamala Harris.

The more Biden gets blamed for 2024, the better Kamala looks for 2028. And yet the truth is that we don’t know what would have happened on Election Day if Biden had stayed in the race. We can project based on our own biases and look at the polls, but it never actually happened.

Biden did not lose in 2024, Kamala Harris did. All the attacks on Biden claim that Kamala could have won if she hadn’t been saddled with Biden. Her people whine that they were never given enough time to properly run a campaign. But Kamala not only had enough time to run one campaign, she had enough time to reinvent her campaign at least three times over.

We’re supposed to blame Biden because Kamala’s ‘Joy’ campaign was so inept that it couldn’t manage to come up with a new platform or print lawn signs, and bet everything on appearances with Oprah and assorted stars. But none of that is Biden’s fault beyond choosing Kamala.

Blaming Biden infantilizes Kamala, the entire party and the media which, we are supposed to pretend, were helplessly in the throes of a senile old man and Dr. Jill, and were responsible for nothing. And since he’s responsible for nothing, then all the blame falls on Jill. Buy the book, ignore the dozen or so elephants (or donkeys) squatting around the room and learn nothing.