Ronna McDaniel, formerly chair of the Republican National Committee, was recently hired and subsequently fired by NBC News when the “talent,” unable to countenance even moderate dissent, revolted on air. The entire kerfuffle is unsurprising in the modern “media.”
But one of the funniest moments of the McDaniel blowup at NBC News came when newish host and former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, another political operative hired by the network, argued that the distinction between her and McDaniel was “truth versus lies.”
What in the holy hell is she talking about?
Only last week, Psaki was lying about Donald Trump’s “bloodbath” comment — which every sentient being understands was a metaphor for economic collapse, not as the MSNBC host explained, an “embrace of political violence” or “dehumanizing language.”
And let’s set aside the “election denialism” of the 2016 contest, which she claimed was “rigged” by Russia. Psaki is proficient in lies big and small, whether she’s spreading run-of-the-mill lies about how Democrats don’t support abortion until birth (almost all do) or whether she’s telling the press that Biden’s dog Major had not bitten Secret Service officers (he’s bitten them 24 times, at least) or she’s spreading hoaxes about Border Patrol agents “whipping” Haitian migrants, Psaki is a wellspring of misinformation.
Even within the normal mendacious parameters of being a White House press secretary, she excelled. When Democrats were campaigning to cram through that massive welfare/cronyism expansion agenda — first named “Build Back Better” and later “Inflation Reduction Act” [sic] — she told the media that “no economist” in the country was predicting higher inflation because of massive government spending. Biden, at least, had the decency to contend that a “serious economist” was warning of disaster. Of course, numerous respected economists, including well-known Democrats, had warned that injecting trillions into a hot economy would exacerbate inflation, as Psaki well knew. She made her claim in November 2021. A month earlier, inflation had risen at its fastest rate since 1990.
During the Biden administration’s deadly botching of Afghan withdrawal, which saw 13 American servicemen murdered at the Abbey Gate outside Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, Psaki lied. When the administration, tied to a political timeline, ignored warnings from intelligence officials that terrorists were taking advantage of unsecured paths that the U.S. was encouraging civilians to use to get to the airport, Psaki bragged that all “American citizens,” “Afghan partners,” and “allies” were being rescued. When someone asked her how many Americans had been left behind in the country, she indignantly told them it was “irresponsible to say Americans are stranded.” But they were right. John Kirby, Pentagon spokesperson flippantly told the press only days later “We have Americans that get stranded in countries all the time.” Everyone knew.
Later, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee found that as many as 9,000 Americans were left in Afghanistan during the Biden Administration’s disastrous withdrawal. An NGO report found that the U.S. “left behind” 78,000 Afghan allies in the chaotic withdrawal.
Then again, even before Psaki was a White House Press Secretary she had been deputized to enact Iran-booster Ben Rhodes’s “echo chamber,” in which the Obama administration manipulated young, pliable, credulous journalists into spreading misinformation about a nuclear deal to empower the Islamic terror state, one of the administration’s highest priorities at the time. When the State Department deliberately cut embarrassing answers within press briefing videos to avoid scrutiny over their concerted effort to mislead the media, Psaki lied to the American people about that, as well.
That is only a small sample of Psaki’s prodigious work. And I have no doubt McDaniel lied for political expediency. But let’s face it, she is a mere piker next to Psaki.
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