how deep does the rabbit hole of lies go?

I had thought Beau Biden, who had served as a soldier (part of the JAG Corps in Iraq, not combat) and died of a brain tumor (glioblastoma, the same as my mom and Ted Kennedy), was the only honorable Biden, but the new (and disingenuous) book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson makes the case that Joe Biden's mental deficiencies had been covered up, primarily by the Biden family itself (in fact, the media were in on the coverup as well, but the saner members of the general public saw through the nonsense, leaving only the mentally deficient true believers to swallow the lies).*

But about putatively noble Beau, this article says:

Tapper and Thompson recount in Original Sin how the Biden family covered up Beau Biden's diagnosis of terminal brain cancer in the summer of 2013, when Beau was the sitting attorney general of Delaware and Joe was the sitting vice president. The family discussed how much information to disclose about Beau's health, but ultimately said nothing as Beau started to limit his public appearances. In November, Beau lied to a reporter and said doctors had given him a "clean bill of health." Several months later, Dr. Wai-Kwan Alfred Yung released a fraudulent statement about how he was "very pleased to give Mr. Biden a clean bill of health" after removing a "small lesion" that was actually a "tumor the size of a golf ball." Beau lied to reporters again and insisted he was "all good." Local media noted that his physical appearance and low public profile had "fueled speculation that he has been undergoing some medical treatment."

Beau continued to serve as attorney general throughout 2014, even as he began having difficulty speaking. In April, he announced his intention to run for governor of Delaware. Meanwhile, Joe Biden used his power as vice president to secretly fly Beau around the country for treatments using a false name. Occasionally, the vice president "instructed his team to mislead the media about his whereabouts," Tapper and Thompson write. Beau's wife, Hallie, didn't understand why they were keeping his illness a secret, but Beau and his father insisted. Reports of Beau's hospitalization days prior to his death in May 2015 do not mention his brain cancer. "He was the chief law-enforcement officer of the state of Delaware, hiding the fact that he was debilitated," Tapper said in an interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick, who downplayed the cover-up as "a personal issue" with low stakes.

The Bidens' ability to get a doctor to lie in order to conceal Beau's illness raises questions about the credibility of Joe Biden's physician of more than 15 years, Dr. Kevin O'Connor. In his final report on Biden's health in February 2024, O'Connor said Biden was "fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency." He did not administer a cognitive test because he "did not believe the science required him to," according to Tapper and Thompson. "We don’t need to. He’s here every day," O'Connor told reporters at the time, while praising his mental cognition as "excellent." O'Connor is a longtime friend of the Bidens who vacations with the family in Nantucket. In 2017, he teamed up with Biden's crackhead son, Hunter, and sketchy brother, Jim, on a rural hospital venture that went bankrupt amid allegations of fraud and patient neglect. Following Beau's cancer diagnosis in 2013, O'Connor consulted on treatment options while the family was hiding the illness from the public.

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, an internist and cardiologist at George Washington University who has served as a consultant to the White House, told Tapper and Thompson that Biden's doctors "may have declined" to do cognitive tests and others kind of testing that could have led to a formal diagnosis. "If there’s no diagnosis, there’s nothing to disclose," he said. "Personally, I don’t agree with this. The public should be informed of the whole truth. Not selective truth." The reporting on the cover-up of Biden's decline makes a strong case that neither the Biden family nor their doctors can be trusted to provide the whole truth. It's not a conspiracy.

Could Trump and his family conceivably do the same thing? I think so. Big Don is certainly vain enough. So far, the Trumps haven't, but you never know.

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*Did you get through that? That was all a single sentence! It's as if I'm turning German.