I'm going to say this right up front. The discussion here is not totally consistent because we are discussing herein a person who is not logical but who operates on emotion. That person is former press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. In my observation, there was always evidence of emotion-driven reality disconnection that KJP carried with her, from the Obama years and forward to becoming Biden’s press flack. There's so much that is inconsistent in this that I'm not sure where to begin.
But I suppose I can start with the idea that in my 50-year-long observations of Biden, I had never seen him once make the correct choice. Not once. This is a factor even Obama identified early on. You may recall: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.”
Sadly, that was true even before we started seeing his mental and physical decline. I have long suspected that the reason Biden's mental meltdown was so obvious was because he had a sizeable head start to that end of the pool, which to my mind explained Obama's quote rather nicely. So, while I wish I could have said KJP being appointed press secretary under Biden was a surprise, it wasn’t.
Fast forward a few years, and like many incurable info junkies (Yes, guilty as charged, your honor), I figured KJP was off the headlines for good, once Biden stumbled off the world stage and face planted in forced retirement. At least, that is, until her new book came out. Now, suddenly she's hot on the list of things to discuss... at least for a few more minutes. So, here we go. Fox News’ Hanna Panreck addresses some of this in an article, just put online over the weekend.
Former Biden White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre unleashed on the Democratic Party in an excerpt from her new memoir, explaining why she decided to become an independent after years as a party flack.
In the excerpt, Jean-Pierre detailed the phone call in which then-President Joe Biden told the White House team that he was dropping out of the race, Newsweek reported.
"Biden seemed to be totally at peace with his decision, but I was stunned, my feelings a blur. I was angry and sad. I was enraged and heartbroken that this man had given more than 50 years of his life to serving the American people, and in the end he’d been treated poorly by members of his own party. It was horrible," Jean-Pierre wrote.
In her new book, "Independent," Jean-Pierre revealed that she never thought Biden would drop out. Jean-Pierre repeatedly touted Biden's physical and mental viability over the years from her position behind the podium, but his cognitive decline wound up dearly costing his party.
As a herd, and as a rule, Democrats seldom dump on their own until things get so embarrassing that there’s nothing else to be done. In that direction lies Jim Trafficant, for example. Bob Menendez. Gary Hart. And, yes, Joe Biden, of whom Robin Williams once observed that Biden says stuff even people with Tourette's syndrome hear, and say, "He did NOT say that." Usually, this judgment isn’t based on the level of misdeeds committed by an individual, but rather how exposed the Democrat party’s agenda is, as a result of supporting and shielding that individual Democrat.
KJP's loyalty to Biden first and party second is of a piece with this, and I suppose prevented her from admitting she was seeing what the rest of us saw; Biden's obvious deer-in-the-headlights act completely got by her. Perhaps she was dealing with it the only way she knew how, which was to ignore it, regardless of any outside questions about it, and in spite of any evidence she herself saw. For example, let’s look at Pierre's duplicity in July of last year, as recorded by the New York Post:
WASHINGTON — President Biden was seen by neurologist Kevin Cannard, who specializes in Parkinson’s disease, at the White House on Jan. 17, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre admitted late Tuesday — hours after telling reporters the opposite at her regular briefing.
The clarification came just a day after Jean-Pierre scolded a journalist for noting the press was “miffed” at her for giving misleading information last week on whether Biden, 81, was medically evaluated after his catastrophic June 27 debate performance.
“Because the date was not mentioned in the question, I want to be clear that the Jan. 17 meeting between [presidential physician] Dr. [Kevin] O’Connor and Dr. Cannard was for the president’s physical,” Jean-Pierre told the Associated Press, whose reporter had asked Jean-Pierre about Cannard’s meeting with O’Connor, which was first reported by The Post this past Saturday.
It doesn't take much to imagine a group of people around a table at the White House, Starbucks in hand, trying to decide how to deal with this problem. It's a measure of how bad the problem was, I think, that they came up with this incredible storyline as the solution. Let’s look at another such mishmash of priorities, this time even more obvious, from Matt Margolis, early last year:
On Tuesday, Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre about the incident.
“How is President Biden ever going to convince the three-quarters of voters who are worried about his physical and mental health that he is OK, even though in Las Vegas he told a story about recently talking to a French president who died in 1996?” he asked.
“I’m not even going to go down that rabbit hole with you, sir,” an exasperated Jean-Pierre replied.
But Doocy wasn't about to let it go. “What is the rabbit hole? He said he talked to Mitterrand."
“You saw the president in Vegas, in California. You’ve seen the president in South Carolina. You saw him in Michigan. I’ll just leave it there,” Jean-Pierre said.
“How is that a rabbit hole?” Doocy asked, but Jean-Pierre moved on, unwilling to address the issue,
.@pdoocy: "How is President Biden ever going to convince the three-quarters of voters who are worried about his physical and mental health that he is ok, even though in Las Vegas he told a story about recently talking to a French president who died in 1996?"
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) February 6, 2024
KJP: "I'm not even… pic.twitter.com/HM0Jt9GBnX
There are many more such examples of KJP tossing disinformation to protect Biden first, and party second (and country last), but I’m quite sure you’ll recall with me those events without my prompting. The mental pressure involved with that kind of thing is costly, and inconsistency is often the result of those internal conflicts because no fully straight-line logic can explain it all. Jean-Pierre seems to have been particularly vulnerable to this. She ended up, often as not, going with whatever sounded good at the time, well, sounded good to HER, anyway.
It says a lot to me that eventually she was more interested in what Biden’s incapacity cost the party, vs what it cost the country. Of itself, that was a shift of priorities, away from what had been her primary loyalty to Biden, that I don't think she's been ready to admit to. So, given her then stated and overt loyalty to party over loyalty to country, why did she eventually leave the Democrat party?
Well, that's where things take an odd turn, because the two loyalties were in direct conflict with each other. She says in her book that she left the party because of the way Joe Biden got treated, not because she was forced by her position to repeatedly spread untruths to the American people in defense of Biden’s decline and the detrimental effect of Biden's policy on the country.
That position compromised her in a lot of ways, and frankly, I’m surprised she stayed as long as she did, after reaching that point. She regards, to this day, Biden’s enforced retirement as what she calls a "firing squad." She got mad because Biden got pushed out by a party that finally recognized the pasting they were going to take at the voting booths the following November with Biden at the top of the ticket. Would she have been happier with the party sticking with Biden and watching him go up in a cloud of smoke on election day?
Let’s be clear here. In my view, she DID know the story. She knew his driveway wasn't all the way to the street. Look, I’m sorry, but how could she be in the same room with Biden on a regular basis and not understand, as everyone outside the White House did, that the guy was always a few bananas short of an ice cream sundae? This is not the emperor has no clothes; it's more the emperor has no brain, and she spent years trying to hide that fact. I think she understood his demise and understood how badly her own credibility suffered at the hands of the people she had been hired to represent. The inconsistencies in her position(s) finally caught up with her.
Once she started working on the book, she began to recognize, I think, that her credibility was going to hurt book sales, as well as prospects for future employment. Besides, my thought is, she understandably didn’t want to have to keep up the false front any longer. She had reached, as I often say, the international "enough" line. Having no professional reason for her party loyalty any longer helped push that choice along.
Future employment? Oh, shed no tears for her on that score. I’m quite sure she’s got a berth at MSNBC, or some such place. Possibly on The View, if one of the current hosts gets canned or otherwise becomes unavailable. That, too, speaks loudly about her values, or rather her lack of them, beyond what is directly in front of her. She does not appear to me to have the ability to think beyond what she sees. Whatever sounds good ends up being the narrative. Oddly, this is the Democrat party she left.
KJP is a lot of things, but in the end, her shifting priorities ended up with her being loyal to Biden and to the party, in that order, and was therefore perfect for the position she held. Until she was no longer in the spotlight, and had to choose between Biden and the Party.
I’ll leave you with one more possibility, one that Stephen Krusier mentioned Feb before last:
One way to bolster a mentally iffy leader is to surround that leader with a cast of idiots who make him look good. That would certainly explain why Pete Buttigieg has a job in Biden's cabinet.
We should cut KJP some slack and assume that she has achieved such an advanced state of blissful ignorance that she doesn't know that the president donated his last brain cell to Corn Pop years ago. In her mind, she's working for the greatest intellectual in the history of American presidential politics.
She knows that's true because Biden told her that's what William Howard Taft always says about him.
Look, I’ve always said that the job of the VP is to make the top of the ticket look good by comparison. That’s how we ended up with Biden as a VP, then Harris. Over time, the people in the VP slot end up being a race to the bottom. It’s not much of a stretch to tag the others around Biden, such as with the same issues, since Creepy Joe so obviously needed the extra help to look good. In that regard, Karine Jean-Pierre was uniquely qualified.
I suspect it'll be some time before we see her name in the press again, if we ever do. And I doubt she will be missed. Her books, before long, will be in the discount rack next to Hillary Clinton's. Yes, she may be discussed, as we have here, in the short term, but, in the end, nobody's going to make a serious note of her departure from the party.
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