One of the worst kept secrets in Washington, D.C. is that Karine Jean-Pierre is bad at her job. Persistently unprepared, embarrassingly reliant on a binder of talking points that outline how to answer substantive questions with meaningless rhetoric, consistently flustered and taken off guard by questions that anyone can predict are coming, and shockingly unversed on some of the most fundamental issues we face, it is certainly reasonable to suggest that a sharper, more coherent president would have long since replaced her as the public face of his administration.
But this is the Biden-Harris White House. So she's been promoted instead.
But Jean-Pierre lumbers towards the finish line of a tenuous run as White House press secretary, she just keeps offering evidence of a strategically confused, morally backward executive branch. The latest came in this hostile exchange with Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy who asked why President Biden could issue immediate relief funds to Lebanon, but says he must wait for Congress to come back in session to authorize such funds to hurricane-ravaged North Carolina.
Jean-Pierre never answers the question before eventually packing up her binder and walking out of the press room. It's uncomfortable, unhelpful, uninformative, and yes, embarrassing.
You could see the visible strain on Doocy's face through the entire mind-bending exchange. But before dismissing it as just another entry into Karine Jean-Pierre's highlight reel of buffoonery, notice her method of deflection. She had no answer to a completely reasonable question, and so her first impulse was to distract from that reality by declaring the question to be "misinformation."
First of all, it's bizarre to label a question "misinformation." I'm not saying it isn't possible to weave a faulty premise into one, but that can be easily undone by a sound response. What I think it reveals, however, is a favored political battle tactic of the left to establish immunity from criticism. Don't respond to criticism, just delegitimize it.
Jean-Pierre has done this on plenty of prior occasions - to this same reporter, no less.
A reporter's questions are "dangerous?" That's actually even more concerning for the future of free speech and a free press than calling them "misinformation," it would seem.
So I need some answers. Specifically, I need some answers from the folks who have told me for four years that I need to be panicked about the authoritarian impulses of Donald Trump. I need answers from those who, for the sake of "democracy" are compromising their principles and values to vote for Kamala Harris.
I've been told to believe that Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, if re-elected to power, would arbitrarily put an end to elections, weaponize the Justice Department against political foes, and silence any opposition. The implication is that such things would not happen under the watchful eye of Kamala and the progressives.
That simply isn't a credible or defensible position any longer.
Not when former Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry is calling the first amendment's guarantee of free speech an "obstacle."
Not when former Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is openly calling for censorship of free expression.
Not when the Democrat press secretary is now dismissing and degrading the nature of diligent, responsible journalism as "dangerous misinformation."
Let's put two and two together - the left views the First Amendment as an "obstacle" to what they want to accomplish. And what do they want to accomplish? They want to "maintain control" by censoring speech. And what kind of speech will they target first for censoring if not the speech they deem, "dangerous misinformation?"
Tell me again about these "threats to democracy."
