Biden and the Debate: Another Consequence of the Blue Team / MSM Alternate Reality? Or a Setup to Ditch Bide? Or What?

There are a couple of hypotheses floating around about Biden's debate performance:

[1] He just had a bad night / he had a cold / he has a stutter.

[2] This is just another case of the Blue Team "living in an alternate reality," refusing to acknowledge facts--but in this case, the facts became undeniable.

[3] The MSM has been covering up Biden's decline; consequently, it was rational for most voters to believe he was fine.

[4] This was all a setup by the Blue elite to ditch Biden.

   I don't know what the hell's going on.

   I mean, I think there's an element of [1] in the mix. And I'd expect him to bounce back in a second debate. He could hardly do any worse. The stuttering thing is bullshit. Of course the progressive-left's go-to strategy is pleading weakness/disability/impairment/disadvantage. They're already shrieking about How dare Trump make fun of Biden's disability!!!111. And we didn't hear about the alleged cold util he started to crash and burn. And, apparently, he went to the Waffle House after the debate and shook a bunch of hands...

   Some combination of [2] and [3] are, I think, pretty likely. Exaggerating your guy's strengths and minimizing his weaknesses is pretty much universal. And the contemporary Blue Team has really gone off the rails with respect to reality generally. This is very much exacerbated by the role of the MSM--really just another branch of the Blue Team--repeating the Blues' doxastic preferences back to it... The Blue Team has set itself up for inevitable disaster.

   But, of course: I was convinced that the Red Team was exaggerating Biden's decline. And I think he's a very bad President. So I had an incentive to think he was in steep decline--but I didn't. So...[1]+[3]? I dunno.

   But I'm warming up to [4], too. The deviation from the standard debate schedule and format...holding the debate so early, and before the convention...and the mass, open panic about ditching him... I'm skeptical about such explanations usually...but in this case, I'd say we can't really rule this out...

   Taibbi writes:

It is hard to believe that Biden’s circle didn’t know this was going to happen. It’s not particularly easy to believe in a scenario in which he was intentionally thrown in a wood-chipper as a trigger for this seemingly coordinated assassination last night and this morning. The scenario that makes the most sense to me at the moment is that Biden’s inner team thought they could pull this off — he’s survived so many previous tests, like the State of the Union — but a waiting gang of party vultures, led perhaps by figures from Chicago, decided to pounce mid-debate and put calls into media mouthpieces before the end of the event. This looked, in other words, like a genuine coup, with party figures agreeing in Shakespearean fashion to take frail Caesar out before his convention coronation.