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Notes -
Did you know that Karine Jean-Pierre was a Black LGBTQ Woman? Of course you didn't.
The above link is to KJP's "interview" with the New Yorker. It's exceptionally horrible. I don't usually get too wrapped up in "bad interviews" because journalists routinely use them to get the other party tied up in knots with impossible to answer questions.
The thing about this interview is that Isaac Chotiner isn't even really asking questions. He's mostly politely asking KJP "what do you mean?" and she keeps answering it worse and worse. I'm having a hard time thinking of a worse written interview.
The culture war angles are too obvious. DEI, rejection of reality, identity politics. They're all here. What stuck me those most was the word salad. Trump is always ridiculed for his own word salad but the left, yet, this is the White House press secretary struggling to build cohesive thoughts.
I've held an unprovable theory for many years now that people who routinely hold demonstrably untrue ideas in their head do some sort of literal brain damage to themselves. A sort cognitive self-harm wherein an emotional appeal is so strong that it dulls the synapses. Again, unprovable, but this interview makes me hold that faith just a little more.
Reading the interview, the interviewer was on a warpath. KJP seems to have stepped outside the party line with her book and now she needs to be brought to heel or pushed aside. Lines like this from the interviewer:
Wow, what a shitball of a question.
This comes after KJP maintains that the Democrats had no idea if they had a better candidate than Biden. Which has to be considered at least somewhat true. So points to her for that.
Outside of that, it's rather obvious KJP is carrying water for Biden. But to what end? Is he not out of politics? The earnest defense of his honor, whilst admirable, is a political dead end. Suicide, even. She's a fish out of water and the interviewer is hammering on that fact again and again. To a point where it obvious, which KJP picks up on at the end of the interview:
I think these final lines sum up the interview quite well. A politically daft operator and a democrat establishment shill embarrassing one another. Sure, KJP was floundering throughout the interview, and I'm sure the book seemed incoherent to those who feel which way the winds blowing politically, but getting caught off guard by a political hitman in a hostile interview can happen to anyone.
To steelman KJP: Running with Biden through the election and then benching him and getting Kamala in as VP was probably the best choice given they did not have a better candidate than Kamala. My guess is that the people behind the scenes got greedy, pushed Biden aside and went with Kamala to their detriment. To that extent, KJP defending the honor of Biden is just as much a political dead end as the interviewers defense of the current democrat establishment. Two political losers fighting over lost scraps.
Here is the thing. I can imagine a world where Jen Psaki, much as I disliked her and everything she stood for, takes that question and makes the interviewer deeply regret asking it. I deeply loath her, but I can admit she was good at her job, if you take her job being to make reporters look more stupid than the administration.
Likewise, look at JD Vance, being the current administration's attack dog, going into hostile media environments and generally having pretty good message discipline, as well as being verbally nimble enough to not appear that he's pointing to a deer and calling it a horse. He generally does a pretty solid job making reporters regret asking him questions by making them look stupid.
KJP was, and is, a preposterously stupid individual who was terrible at her job. Her elevation to the position, and the fact that she somehow rode it until the wheels fell off, was probably one of the most obvious signs that nobody was in charge in the Biden administration.
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