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I'm not finished with the book yet, but it explicitly rejects the more aggressive notion much of MAGA advanced that Biden was a husk from the start of his Presidency that could barely string two sentences together. It claims there were some issues early on, but it was plausibly just Biden's stutter being a bit worse, and him getting tired a little faster. It further claims the bottom really fell out around the start of 2023.
You can reject it all you want, that's not the issue. The point is that Biden was exhibiting enough worrying behavior to warrant questions about whether he's fit for office. It never was a crazy conspiracy theory that the establishment media, including the author, portrayed it as. Even if the more aggressive notion was (originally) wrong, it was still reasonable and justified.
I don't know why the establishment insists on disagreeing with populists in the most obnoxious ways possible, but in anything from "hug an Asian day" at the wake of Covid to smugposting about how safe Brussels is like a week before someone suicide bombed himself there, they just can't seem to express a simple sentiment like "I disagree, but I see where you're coming from". A good deal of the trust issues with media could be solved if they were capable of respectful disagreement.
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“Plausibly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Biden had a 50 year career in public office and the first time his “stutter” was ever rolled out as an excuse was in the 2020 presidential race to explain away aphasic rambling incoherencies on the campaign trail. Even if he did have a stutter as a child, he did not as an adult.
The Afghanistan withdrawal debacle was in August 2021, barely half a year into his term, and Biden was out of public view during the march on and fall of Kabul for days before making a public appearance. He was showing signs during the 2020 campaign, but this was the moment when I was certain that he was being kept out of public view on his bad days. Trying to say that this only really started in 2023 is stage two of the modified limited hangout, and is a self-serving lie to help protect the political media from the fallout of years of collaborative deception.
Original Sin is a scapegoating effort to deflect blame from the party and media organs that propped up a wheezing husk of a pretty mediocre and sleazy career politico in order for the party to try to hang on to power for a few measly years. That you are buying it tells me that you want to be deceived.
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