In fairness to new (Black, LGBTQ) White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, defending President Biden’s plan to beat inflation with higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, is not empirically possible…even with years of job explaining experience. Nevertheless, Jean-Pierre’s early awkwardness may be due to the fact that she has to read her notes, and can’t think on her feet. But she’s not alone, and not the worst at this. Witness the word salads of Vice President Kamala Harris, or the mystifying rambling of the Commander in Chief, or the air-grasping babbling of the Speaker of the House.
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45 replies on “Thinking on Your Feet: Biden’s New Press Secretary Baffles, a Skill Perfected by Her Boss”
Isn’t the phrase ill gotten gains, not ill begotten? Completely different meanings, yes?
I think not only the president but, the vice president and the speakers of the house should take annual cognitive test too!
Everyone in the line of succession down to the tenth level. (Which currently falls somewhere south of the Secretary of Commerce.) America needs to be certain that a disaster in leadership will not by chance or design place a mental incompetent in our highest office.
a disaster in leadership
This is precisely what we have now. Our leaders are a disaster. And I include quite a few R among that list.
Agreed wholeheartedly. I think that a reasonable, legal argument could be made on the floor(s) of Congress for a basic cognitive test for any candidate over a certain age. Because lifespans are greater than they were even a few decades ago people might outlive their mental acumen. It’s not that they should be spurned or ridiculed, it’s that they shouldn’t be in positions of power requiring quick wit and stamina.
Those people should enjoy their last years of decline and diminished capacity among family and friends and not be making life and death decisions for our nation.
On the other hand, we really don’t want to rule out those who by virtue of longevity and experience have gained a wisdom and scope of knowledge beyond those of lesser years. Some people do stay sharp for a long time well into their elder years.
A simple cognitive test would provide a good basis for telling the two sorts apart. That should be doable, at least once the Democrats crash and burn for their own stupid mistakes.
The disaster in leadership isn’t quite as bad as some are making it out to be. If you listen to some sources we’re all going to starve tomorrow and get nuked the next day. There are still some reasonably competent people in positions of power here and there. I’m not selling short the heinous disaster of the Biden Administration. Thanks to our system they can only destroy the nation just so fast and no faster.
POTUS is not synonymous with King no matter how badly the Left would like it to be when they have their man in power. (Seriously, I think that’s one of the reasons they were so stupefyingly terrified of Trump. They think the POTUS has a lot more power than he actually does.)
The Hoover Institution has some good videos by sources I find reasonably trustworthy. H.R. McMasters, John Cochrane and Niall Ferguson (stupid way to spell “Neil” but …) do a podcast called “GoodFellows” that’s pretty accurate as far as the topics they address go. Also the Hoover podcasts of “Battlegrounds”, “Perspectives on Policy” and “Uncommon Knowledge” are well worth the time to watch them.
I see hope in some of the in-depth analysis from those sources. I think we’ll survive this administration OK but I don’t think that Biden and his unelected committee of radical Leftists, all deaf and blind to reality, are doing the nation or the Democrat Party any favors. There’s going to be a mess and long road to recovery before this is all over. More’s the pity, it didn’t have to be like this.
It’s only appropriate that a blithering evil idiot be represented by another blithering evil idiot.
I would postulate that the election of criminal traitors like the Obama-nation and Beijing Biden resulted from intelligence (and decency) test failures given to the American electorate in 2008, 2012, and 2020.
So why don’t they ever actually tell us all what the fair share is. Is it 20% on gross, 50%. Doocy should hit them with that question.
But he needs to preface it with the stats on who actually pays income taxes on what percentage the highest 10% of earners pay vs the bottom 50% of earners.
one of your best!… I fear the entire western world is now governed by incompetents…
Great podcast, Bill. As regular as Pepto Bismol, bro. 😉
The entire current government, all of the people, are prime examples of “The Peter Principal.” That is: that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to “a level of respective incompetence”:
Unfortunately, Biden passed that point many elections ago.
Yep! In his FIRST term in whatever office he started with.
Well, she DID stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. So there’s that.
Good idea for all government jobs, and “we’ll leave the lights on for them”.
In my opinion, many of the comments are valid and you, Bill, have outlined clearly the disastrous nature of our current “pilots”. As an old saying goes, “You can’t fix stupid” and yet we continue to try, to excuse, to deflect, while the plane heads into the mountain. Oh joy!
Thank you Bill. The fact that the so-called “leaders” of our federal government can’t think for themselves (on their feet or off their feet) is yet another reason why the federal government should be given as little as possible to do. If we can’t elect anyone competent, at least limit the damage they can do.
That’s why the Constitution is a “must know” for all government leaders at every level, from city council to President of the US. And they should be required to have a pocket copy of the Constitution to which they will refer to determine the Constitutionality of any propsed federal legislation.
Any proposed federal law should meet the ‘Constitutionality barrier’, according to the original meanings of the words in the Constitution. All of that is easy to do. For the most part, all that is necessary is to possess, and refer to often, The Geneva Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Webster’s “American Dictionary of the English Language” (1828). All potential candidates for public office, down to the city council in your town, should be familiar with what those documents say and mean.
I am willing to bet, without much worry of having to pay up very often, that most of our public officials are demonstrably idiots of America’s founding principles.
You just have to watch any of them being questioned by Congress or interviewed to see how woefully ignorant they are. As are the Congress Critters asking the questions often. Unfortunately, this includes members of the Supreme Court. I’m looking at you Sotomayor.
In defense of the new Press Secretary, Congi Rice wasn’t asked to defend insane indefensible positions. If you asked anyone to explain the statement, “If you want to get inflation under control, you have to raise taxes on corporations”, they would stumble badly too. The political pros would just answer a different question and hope most people didn’t notice.
There was a point in her response where she paused, and I believe she was thinking to herself- “OMG what have I gotten myself into? I have to explain the stupid things that man says and tweets!”
If I had that job I would have said something to the effect of “Now, Peter, you know the President doesn’t actually tweet on that account. The JR staffer got instructions for separate tweets that went out as one. Of course taxing corporations fairly doesn’t impact inflation, in fact has nothing to do with inflation. It has to do with . . .(read scripted answer now).”
She still could have gotten to her (albeit stupid) point about taxes and fairness and climate while completely burying the stupidity of the tweet.
BTW – I just wrote that as stream of conscious without any forethought. I could do Karen’s (sorry Karine’s) job much better. But since I am neither a POC nor a lesbian nor a woman, I suppose I am not qualified for that job – those being the only discernible prerequisites for the position.
I find it vastly amusing observing the catastrophic failure rate of the Democrat Party’s affirmative action hiring policies.
In swapping “the person for the job” with “the job for the person” they have completely upended working meritocracy for unworkable entitlement. Thus providing the body politic with obvious public object lessons on why that’s a terrible idea.
We have a President who doesn’t know where he is, a Vice-President who nobody knows where she is, and now a spokes-model who knows nothing except that she’s a black, lesbian woman.
At least she did not circle back on it
The constant intersectional “firsts” are getting very wearing here in Britain too. The concept is being worn down to a meaningless stub.
Britain’s first female Prime Minister was in 1979, Margaret Thatcher. The first ethnic minority Prime Minister was in 1868, Benjamin Disraeli (baptised into the Church of England, but ethnically a Sephardi Jew). The first Asian MP, Dadabhai Naoroji, was elected in 1892. The first black MP, John Stewart, was elected in 1832. The first black guy to vote in a British general election, Ignatius Sancho, did so in 1774!
We haven’t had an openly gay PM yet, and that will be a matter of note, but are we really going to have to have a media orgasm when the first black lefthanded lesbian with a lisp (and who doesn’t like marmite) becomes PM?
Interestingly, the only one of the people I’ve listed that the left seems interested in is Naoroji, who was a Liberal and an Indian Nationalist. ALL the other were Tory/Conservative, funny that isn’t it?
It is amazing how when “feminists” talk about glass ceilings and women in politics, Thatcher never gets mentioned. Bill Cold War episode that discussed Reagan and Thatcher was fabulous. Too bad more people don’t hear her story because she was the “wrong kind” of feminist.
Spot on, and it’s true of all the various “victim groups” that make up the neo-Feudal power structures of Mickey Mouse Marxism. Being “Queer” doesn’t seem to actually have anything to do with the fairly basic business of having relations with your own sex anymore. It’s all about your political positions. I’ve been told I’m not “really” gay, Thomas Sowell isn’t “really” black, Maggie Thatcher somehow doesn’t count as a woman. Now we have “transexuals” who just declare they are now off the opposite gender, and maybe condescend to grow their hair long, or cut it short, but make not other move to actually transition. As always, it’s Newspeak, words mean what The Party says they mean.
Still, the scales do seem to be dropping (at long last) from some feminist, black and gay/lesbian eyes.
One of the ones that got me was when Martina Navratilova (gay, female, feminist, athlete) tried to say that men (trans-women) competing against women was bad for women’s sports. She got threatened with cancelation. This despite the fact that she support Renee Richards competing on the women’s WTA back in the day. Everyone seems to forget that Renee was 40 and still competing and winning and 22 year olds.
Martina had all the background bonafides, but dared contradict the new narrative.
Oh, she was also a pretty good tennis player.
It really is all about the narrative.
That was a great discussion between you and Ron SAE but …
It strains credulity to suggest that the British People have fallen so far from their own traditions and values so as to elect a PM who openly doesn’t like Marmite. Surely in that case the adjective “Great” must be stricken from the name Great Britain.
Really, Davey, you’ve gone too far now. Even if that particular unicorn exists it would never dare make such a declaration publicly if it ever hoped to mount political office.
Some things are beyond the pale.
🙂
Marmite was created by a German scientist and I believe was done so in revenge for GB winning too many wars against Germany.
Now, the reason for Haggis, escapes me. But Scotland has many other redeeming qualities, a dram of which I am enjoying currently.
Lol, I actually like both Marmite and Vegemite but they are acquired tastes.
I’ll not eat haggis nor, even though I’m Scandinavian by heritage, will I contemplate allowing the merest bit of lutefisk in proximity to my nose or mouth. It is a foul concoction of lesser Scandinavians, a holdover from the time of pagan gods and darkest ages, the era of blood eagles and mother disrespecting. The product of a culture most foul in the days when a sister’s virtue was only safe when the sheep were willing and near to hand (and other protuberances). A vile, noisome, nauseating and putrid dish of fish rotted in lye and ingested by bridge trolls, cave ogres and vilest of all … Norwegians (shudder).
I once heard someone disparage that wee dram which you state you’re enjoying right now but there’s no accounting for crazy people …
T’was a fat old black dude and he said “People only drink to get drunk, liquor tastes terrible so there’s no other reason to drink it.”
I replied …
“Nae, lad, ye canna say that abou’ a misty single malt Scots creme. For do you so after sampling a dram or two then the gates of hell stand wide in your future. Flee the demon rum and embrace the sweet angels of the highland distiller’s art, says I. Be ye warned, says I. Drink ye but in moderation for flavor and fun says I. Or the flames of the infernal furnace await ye and yer get to the seventh generation.”
He looked at me like I was nuts. Don’t know why.
There are many acquired tastes. Some are more valuable to acquire than others.
Lutefisk is one I would never think about.
Everybody has word gaffes every so often. But Biden, and others on this administration seem to be exceptionally bad at it, and don’t seem to know that they are doing it. If I flubbed up “kleptocrsy” more than once, I’d stop and say something like “Darn it, I need a larger speech buffer. My brain is outpacing my mouth. Either that, or once again it’s gone on vacation and didn’t have the decency to tell me where it’s going, so I could at least join it! …. Let me try again.” And then proceed. Acknowledge my flubb, correct it, and even poke fun at myself.
Self awareness, and self confidence.
Excellent points – but when you do it (like me) we are speaking our own words. If you are reading somebody else’s words off a teleprompter, you don’t know you flubbed until your brain catches up to what it should have been.
Also – there is no way that at his age Biden doesn’t need glasses to see the prompter. His vanity is really ludicrous. Put your glasses on and stop squinting, Joe.
Oh is that what’s going on? I thought Joe had spent so much time sucking up to the Red Chinese he was beginning to look like them.
He looks more like Jeff Dunham’s Walter every day
Having these mentally impaired people run our country is just another gaslighting middle finger from The Radical Left pointed at us Normals. Remember the good old days when Lefties loved to laugh at an inarticulate, stupid President? Or how about when we couldn’t elect some old white dude becasue he could die and his dopey, female VP was unfirt for office? Ah, the good ol’ days!
I enjoyed the analogy Bill but it is called the Ship of State for a reason What works for Aircraft can’t and will not work for countries you need a single competent commander who can and will over ride advice when in the commanders judgement the mission will be best served otherwise. The problem we really have is none of the people you mentioned are the ones making the decisions.
I have no bias against geriatrics, being 73 myself, but if I were responsible for the well-being of a nation, not to mention a global super-power, I would insist on a cognitive test annually at least! The lack of self-awareness in this administration is beyond embarrassing. It’s becoming lethal.
Just to expand on what you said a bit …
The lack of cognitive testing puts us in a place where we must by default assume a leader has all his marbles.
I.E. “Joe’s a senile, senescent, doddering, blithering fool.” is countered with the non-sequitur “That can’t be true, he’s the President of the United States.”
Clearly the latter does not preclude the former.
Without cognitive testing any senile, senescent, doddering, blithering old fool can be installed as a puppet. Normally the person who rises to the top in our selection process is an iron-willed pragmatic A-type personality. Such a person in a position of such power cannot much be pushed around. Whereas it’s fairly easy to steer a senile, senescent, doddering, blithering old fool in the direction you want him to stumble.
The steering of the old ninny being accomplished by an unelected, unaccountable committee removes accountability from the entire equation.
Which as you point out results in a lethal situation.
Donald Trump, whom I would argue was the greatest President of the United States since Ronald Reagan, had a fatal flaw of his own. He was unable to contain his own ego and carelessly shovelled endless attack fodder to his enemies. I’m not talking about “offensive tweets”, he never even came close to offending me on any issue. I’m talking about the entire gestalt of his public persona. He aided his own defeat by his own behavior.
That was a chink in his armor, one of the only chinks that could be exploited, which the opposition used to full effect. That they lied, cheated, exaggerated, misquoted and hyperbolized to attack him is dishonorable and immoral but it’s the way politics functions even so.
This, combined with other factors equally significant (COVID in particular), presented the opposition with a perfect storm of opportunity. Left with the choice to run Bernie Sanders and certain defeat, some fairly brilliant but evil minds went to work on getting a senile, senescent, doddering, blithering old fool installed as their puppet in the Oval Office.
These evil but brilliant minds were successful, but just barely. Their skulduggery eked Joe Biden over the top with a very thin margin. If any one of the several tools in their bag of dirty tricks had been less successful than it was, Joe would not have won. If any factor in our favor had been slightly firmer, even with all the cheating, plotting, conspiring and hacking of the Left, Trump was still popular enough to have won.
And so here we are today, in a place and time where that chicanery is incubating a growing, lethal threat. A threat that might have been avoided if the cognitive testing Bill is talking about in this video were implemented.
Even so and all that said, we will still probably be saved from the complete overthrow of our Republic by the wisdom of our Founders in setting up the system we have. Because despite the perception of some people, ultimate power is not a thing that can be seized readily in the United States of America.
Thank you for fleshing out the point I wanted to make, and for doing it so thoroughly. I agree exactly with your assertions regarding President Trump (and Biden as well). I could see him doing the damage to his cause, but I hoped fervently that he wouldn’t sink it. Now, I am hoping the MAGA movement can prevail, that it is strong enough to survive him. I loved him for carrying the country forward as he did, with his obvious (yes, Reagan-esque) patriotism, but the chink you spotted will, I hope. be sufficient to keep him out of office. I think the distractions he would bring would further aggravate the nation. Hopefully, the America First ideals will prevail under someone with way less ego-baggage. Thank you so much for taking the time to reply.
I agree with you about Trump running again and becoming more of a distraction because of his inability to rein in his ego, not to mention the absolute tsunami of vitriol and resistance and dirty tricks that would be hurled against him – I’d guess at least 100-fold compared to his previous presidency.
I was an ardent supporter of Trump while he was in office, and have no doubt he would have been reelected had he and the red states not been cheated out of his win. The momentum he might have with a second run might be the result of the graphic display of the mendacity and evil the left is capable of and what it has accomplished in a mere 2 years. The comparison between Trump’s presidency and Biden’s, if one has any sense left to see it, is so obviously in Trump’s favor that only the most propaganda bedazzled NPC couldn’t see it.
We need another dark horse outsider to run for 2024, if it’s not going to be DeSantis. Who might that be? Is our Jeremy Amsden too much of a hothead? I think ACT’s would be an excellent Secretary of State. Bill, with Scott, Steve and Alfonso in his cabinet? Yeah, I’d vote for him.
You dared criticize Donald Trump and got a downvote for that so I used mine to put you back at neutral. There are people in here who absolutely are full blown personality cultists of Donald Trump and don’t think anyone but him can “save us”. Any criticism of His Saviorness is therefor disdained and derided.
It wasn’t Trump’s ego that solely cost him the election but it was a factor and as I stated above if any single factor on our side had been even slightly stronger Trump would be sitting in the Oval Office right this minute. His ego wasn’t the only thing that screwed us but it was a significant factor.
There are two vital aspects in any candidate for our side which cannot be overlooked. One is the Conservative ideology and the other could perhaps be called “winableness”. By that I mean that a candidate has a fair shot at winning. Because no matter how pure his/her ideology might be that doesn’t do bupkus if they are unelectable and have no chance to win the office they’re running for.
The Democrats know this all too well. That’s why they HAD to get someone “winnable” set up as their candidate because if they didn’t pull strings and exercise coercion it was going to be Bernie Sanders and he is not electable to the office of POTUS. The reason it was going to be Bernie is the Democrats have allowed themselves to be pulled so far left that they’ll vote themselves into political suicide if left to their own mores. You can see this is so by looking at the stupid things they’re doing right now.
Bill has long been harping on the fact that we need to put more effort into the culture war. I can’t even count how many times I’ve heard him quote Andrew Breitbart’s “Politics is downstream of culture” adage.
Trump was the first major Republican to tap into that angle. He didn’t just run on economics, tax cuts and the usual Republican issues. He was a cultural figure before he ran for President and knew how to apply cultural pressure successfully.
Glenn Youngkin was about to lose the Virginia Gubernatorial race but in the last few months before polling began he seized on cultural issues and that put him in the big chair for a long standing Blue State. Culture was the key that opened the door to the Governor’s Mansion for Youngkin.
DeSantis barely won his first term as Governor of Florida but today he’s hugely popular in that State because not only is he using the lever of culture to drive his politics but he’s actually making laws against the things we all know to be wrong. DeSantis is the new Trump in that he’s speaking the will of The People and The People love him for doing that. This is where Trump was before his ego snuck up and bit him in the ass.
Trump’s ego burned him out. He should have stood up to the authors of the plandemic, he should have fired Tony Fauci immediately after “two weeks to flatten the curve” ended and it was clear that he was never going to satisfy the opportunists using the Coof against him. He should have done a lot of cultural things that would mesh with his excellent political policies. He didn’t and even if he runs and wins his time is passed.
Because it’s not about getting Donald Trump back in the Oval Office, it’s about Conservatism (which Trump wasn’t really very good at) saving the United States from the existential threat of Leftist Post-Modern Neo-Marxism. There’s a bigger picture here than even Donald Trump’s ego.
Just excellent, thank you (: