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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.
I think that some claims are more difficult to defend than others. If you write a book without controversial claims, perhaps a work of fiction or a textbook on a well established field, then an interviewer would likely not feel the need to cross-examine you.
But if you published a book about how Trump is secretly a lizardman, I would hate to see an interviewer who just goes "interesting opinion, man".
Claiming that Biden was forced out of the race for some nefarious reasons while he was mentally fine to be president is trying to claim an 'alternative truth'. I hate it when Trump does these things (starting from the size of his inauguration crowd), because I feel that people should strive to agree on facts. I do not like it any better when some lefty makes claims which seem factually wrong, and I applaud efforts to probe if she has extraordinary evidence for her extraordinary claims.
I do not think that "Biden had dementia which made him an unappealing candidate" was a particularly Democratic party line. It was basically the consensus reality. Anyone who pushes back against people trying to make our collective map of reality worse is doing god's work.
I think that by the time of the TV debate, the Democrats had already maneuvered themselves in an unwinnable position. Running with Harris as a candidate was not great, but running with someone who had been seen on TV as suffering from dementia would not have gone better.
I think this is overly charitable. The Democratic Party Line up until halfway through the debate was "This is the best Biden has ever been and any suggestions or "video evidence" otherwise are cheap fakes from that liar Trump."
Then the debate happened, and the extent of Biden's decline was at last laid bare before the voting populace, and the movers and shakers in the party acknowledged his dementia just long enough to force him out of the race and replace with Kamala in a Hail Mary effort to not get destroyed down-ballot.
After which the party line flipped to something like "OMG, why are you even talking about this? Who care who was running the country, or how many people told how many lies about it? Trump is old, too!"
The real problem with KJP is that she is still talking about it, and she's not even remotely smart enough to thread the needle of lies there. Quite possibly no one is. Biden's overall situation is bad enough that it ought to be a crippling scandal for the party, and the Democrat Party Line is to simply brazen through on sheer shamelessness, an important part of which is simply pretending it never happened. Writing a book and putting it back into the news cycle because KJP is a sub-midwit who is just blindly following the formula without reading the room, is counter productive to this tactic.
Compare that to Jake Tapper's book on the topic (As an aside, I'm going to need either him or James Clapper to drop out of relevance forever. I'm sick of getting them mixed up because their names rhyme.) Tapper's book was utterly, shamelessly retarded and disingenuous. But it served the purpose of providing a fig leaf for the "Democrat operative with a chyron" media and the Democrat party to pretend they had no role in the scandal and sweep it all under a rug. It let them pull the "We've been over this, it's old news, MoveOn.org" rhetorical trick.
I'd say no one with a brain believed it, but there are plenty of people even here who get very upset about Trump's cheating fuckboy relationship with the truth who seem to mostly not care who was actually running the country for the Biden years, and certainly haven't updated on the degree of known dishonesty that was clearly involved among functionally all high ranking Democrats.
Which brings us back to the real problem with KJP. She gave me a platform and excuse to hammer all that home again, really rub everyone noses in the reminder that Biden's dementia was a scandal a thousand times worse than Watergate, and that anyone who doesn't write off most of the DNC doesn't get to pretend to care about truth and norms ever again. And she did this not just while failing to provide any useful rhetorical chaff, but while making the situation actively worse and also reminding everyone about the consequences of DEI hires.
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