When a boxer or wrestler who would normally be expected to trash-talk his opponent instead gushes about how strong they are, be suspicious. Here is the Jen Psaki story the press want to talk about:
“Jen Psaki Has Now Held More Press Briefing Than All Of Trump’s Press Secretaries Combined” – Jason Easley, Politicus USA. Mr Easley writes,
Biden and Jen Psaki have returned the government back to the people and restored accountability to the Executive Branch. The Trump administration consistently set records for days between press briefings.
This story about Psaki’s achievement in having done her job on two hundred separate days has been syndicated across the English speaking world. Jason Easley’s enthusiasm is matched by that of David Charter in the (London) Times: “Jen Psaki holds onto the White House job no Trump aide could handle”
For 14 months Psaki has earned a reputation for calmness under fire, no-nonsense put-downs and an ability to dodge most of the traps set by the more pugilistic members of the White House press corps. She has Facebook pages devoted to her including the Jen Psaki Fan Group, which recently discussed: “Are we seeing the next US president?”
I hope that Mr Charter remembered the stamped addressed envelope and the required four box tops from special Psaki-edition cartons of Rice Krispies when he sent off for his membership badge. He regales us with tales of her witty put-downs of Fox News reporters and Republican Senators. Only a spoilsport would say that the information revealed in the eleventh paragraph of the Times story, the one paragraph out of fourteen that had any news value, might have been given more prominence:
Psaki is also adept at evading well-aimed arrows. She was put on the spot about her tweet during the election campaign dismissing a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop as “Russian disinfo”. The New York Times finally conceded this week that emails from the laptop had been “authenticated”. Psaki’s response? “I’d point to the Department of Justice and Hunter Biden’s representatives. I’m a spokesperson for the United States; he doesn’t work for the United States.”
Emphasis added.
The New York Post’s October 2020 scoop about Hunter Biden’s laptop was censored by Facebook and Twitter, derided by the establishment media, and certified as “Russian disinfo” by “dozens of former intel officials”, according to Psaki. For some reason the Post wanted to talk about that rather than her 200th briefing: “Psaki won’t defend claim Post’s Hunter Biden laptop scoop was ‘Russian plant’”.
He ought to be ashamed of himself and his profession.
It was not clever for her to say, “I’d point to the Department of Justice and Hunter Biden’s representatives. I’m a spokesperson for the United States; he doesn’t work for the United States.”
Because if there had been one professional journalist in that room the next question would have been, “Yes, but your boss does work for the US Government and the email imply that he was a beneficiary of Hunter Biden’s questionable business dealings. So, answer the original question.”
Donald John Trump used to answer questions HIMSELF – Mr Biden is unable to do that, because Mr Biden is senile. Yes senile – someone inform “Lexington” of the Economist magazine of this fact, but he is too busy writing a puff piece on Mr Biden (last week) or a personal attack on the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (this week).
As for Mr Easley he is not making an innocent error – he is knowingly trying to deceive his readers. The American “mainstream media” are scum.
Sadly, Mr Charter shows that parts of the British media (such as the Times) are just as bad, at least when it comes to American politics.
The charges of massive corruption against Hunter Biden and JOSEPH Biden have now been admitted to be TRUE – even by the New York Times.
Yet there are no demands that Joseph Biden be Impeached and sent to prison – Mr Charter (of the London Times) treats the matter as a trivial matter – the corruption of the Biden family in relation to China and the UKRAINE is a minor aside to him. His focus is writing a puff piece on Jen Psaki.
And this piece of excrement, for that is what Mr Charter is, calls himself a journalist.
If the Democrats openly admitted to rigging the 2020 Presidential Election (said “oh yes the mail-in ballots were often FAKE”) Mr Charter and Mr Easley would ignore the confession – and would write a puff piece about Jen Psaki’s latest hair style.
This is how far journalism has fallen.
One does suspect why the NYT now decides to verify the original NY Post story.
Are the NYT editors getting worried that Biden is a complete lost cause and liability, and want him moved aside before 2024?
Can anyone explain to me what the Hunter Biden story actually is? I mean what is the worst accusation that has been made about Joe Biden?
In defence of David Charter, I do have a book by him from about 10 years ago in which he argued that Britain’s withdrawal from the EU was an inevitability. So, he got that right.
In a nutshell, Hunter Biden was paid oodles of money from Chinese and Ukrainian companies specifically in order to buy Vice President Joe Biden’s happy influence. Millions. Joe Biden actually received parts of that money, and kept showing up to do photo-ops with Hunter and his bribers and friends.
The rest was just sort of a sad story about how drug abuse ruins your life.
Not sure the Ukrainians got their money’s worth.
The ordinary Ukrainian citizen definitely got nothing.
As for the connected Ukrainians who were tied into the shadowy networks and involved in the money sloshing around the country… who knows? Maybe buying the influence of the Bidens was critical to securing more ‘development’ aid for Ukraine… money that could be siphoned into their own coffers.
Patrick, the retrospective here includes such pre-election gems as
It was obvious at the time that the Hunter Biden laptop was the real deal, and the NYT and other MSM who suppressed the story in the final weeks of the election were engaged in conscious coordinated lying, preventing as many voters as possible from encountering it because they would inevitably see it was the real deal if they did. There was a vast amount of actual silence, some rare explicit silence like the above quote, and even rarer misdirection – like the article I saw in the Christian Science Monitor (the only one they published in the whole period between its surfacing and election day that even hinted at it). The CSM had arranged to have a reporter on the Trump campaign flight on a day that chanced to fall almost exactly half-way between the story breaking and the election. Of course, Trump wanted to talk about it and the reporter had to file a story. There was a certain skill in how the reporter wrote it up in a way that ensured that no-one not already wholly familiar with the story would understand what Trump had been going on about.
I recall reading an interesting blog article (personal, not political) by a recovered drug addict explaining (from his sad earlier experience) how the circumstances of Hunter failing to retrieve the laptop were typical crack-head behaviour. I cannot find the link and mention it in case anyone else does and can find it (I expect I came across it via instapundit or similar).
Mr Joseph “The Big Guy” Biden has been accepting corrupt money for many years – selling his office, selling his influence. He is a criminal.
The “mainstream media” know this – but they do not care. They do not care because they are “Pragmatists”, the School of Philosophy of John Dewey and co.
The “mainstream media” believe that there are no objective and universal moral standards – and that if someone pushes “Progressive” (i.e. Collectivist) political objectives, that is all that matters.
A society whose elite is so corrupted, corrupted by the elite education system (which just ASSUMES that “Progressive” policies are correct) is in terrible trouble.
And, no, I am not just talking about the United States.
And…. if the mainstream media actually had the Democrats formally confessing that the 2020 United States Presidential election was rigged. They WOULD NOT CARE.
They are not outraged that the 2020 United States Presidential Election was rigged – on the contrary they SUPPORT the Election Fraud.
After all – “Trump” had to be removed, so that “Progressive policies” could be followed. To them – the ends justify the means.
He didn’t get the nickname “the Senator from MBNA” for nothing. He’s been famously for sale ever since he started his political career in 1970. I suspect that he was finally acceptable to the American king-makers because everyone owns a piece of him.
Patrick Crozier,
I acknowledge that David Charter is one of the better Times reporters on the US. (His Times colleague Gerard Baker is very good indeed, and has been ploughing a lonely furrow in warning how anti-Trump censorship damages democracy for several years now, but Baker is a columnist not a reporter.) I do think David Charter is far enough out of the bubble to see that some acknowledgement must be made of how wrong he and the rest of the mainstream media were about Hunter Biden’s laptop, but’s sad to see that he seems to be trying to slip in this acknowledgement as the eleventh paragraph of a fourteen paragraph puff piece.
Regarding your question about what the Hunter story actually is, the difficulty is that it is lots of different stories. Others have mentioned some of the strands. One of them relates to the fact that Hunter Biden was on the board of a Ukrainian oil and gas company called Burisma Holdings from 2014 to 2019. During the first part of this period his father was vice-president. There’s a Twitter thread by someone called Jeff Carlson here that lists some of the emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop that strongly suggest that in 2015 Hunter Biden was getting Joe Biden to “close down” “any cases or pursuits” against Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma.
Further to Natalie’s comment above, Niall pedant Kilmartin will add to the strand she mentioned the interesting fact that Joe Biden (then in charge of Ukraine matters under Obama) visited the Ukraine and made it clear that a 6 billion (IIRC) grant from the US would not be paid unless the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma was sacked. He then came back to the US and in public (the video is online) concluded the tale by boasting, “And guess what? The guy got fired!”
More was done to keep the story quiet than just silence. After the repair shop man’s attempts to restore the laptop to Hunter were ignored for the legal time, he became its owner. He looked at it and then alerted the authorities to the concerning matter on it (the porn and stuff IIRC, rather than the political matter). The FBI sat on it for a long time, but after the story was broken in their despite, he was made aware that the narrative punishes those who give it something to hide.
“Are there any questions? First Susan? Where are you Susan? Oh, there you are. I believe you have a question for me?”
And they call themselves journalists.
bobby b – you are correct, but you miss something.
Yes Mr Joseph Biden is corrupt – he is a criminal, a bribe taker. But he also supports the “correct” Progressive policies.
He always had – the “moderate Biden” was always a myth (look at his voting record in the United States Senate).
The left supported Mr Biden in 2020 because they knew not only that he was corrupt, and that he was SENILE (so could be manipulated), but also that HE HAD ALWAYS BEEN ON THEIR SIDE ANYWAY.
I repeat – HE HAD ALWAYS BEEN an ever Bigger Government person. Long before he went senile.
Paul Marks
March 21, 2022 at 8:55 am
“Yes Mr Joseph Biden is corrupt – he is a criminal, a bribe taker. But he also supports the “correct” Progressive policies.”
I’m still convinced that Biden has no actual and personal political bent such as “moderate” or “far left.” If many of his exploits have benefited the far left, that’s because those are the people who offered the most reward, most frequently, to him. He was truly a common carrier. (If you have the price of the ticket, you get to ride no matter who you are.)
His got his “MBNA Senator” label doing the work for that banking corporation just as it was getting hammered for its unsavory credit practices. That can’t have endeared him to the Senator Warrens of the world.
P.S. I think I may have posted this link before, but here’s a good article about Biden’s efforts o/b/o banks in Mother Jones, back in 2019 when they wanted him out of the race. This is not an essentially progressive guy. MBNA paid him well.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/11/biden-bankruptcy-president/
bobby be – I refer you to the voting record of then Senator Joseph Biden.
He is corrupt – but he also has beliefs (or he did – before age took its toll).
Mr Joseph Biden believed one aspect of Catholic social teaching (nothing else – just this bit) the state must help the people with government spending and regulations (see the Encyclicals on the matter – going way back to Leo XIII in 1891, but much more recent ones as well) – and this aspect of Catholic social teaching was also part of Progressive Protestant (the “mainline Protestant” churches of the United States) teaching – for example Richard Ely was declared blessed by the American Episcopal Church – proof they had gone stark-starting-mad.
The atheist teachers and college professors also taught that government must help the people with endless more government spending and regulations. That is what they mean by “reform”.
So where ever young Joseph looked he was told that the government spending on domestic benefits and services must go up (never down) and there must be ever more regulations, to “help the people”.
This is the one thing he does believe – and it is how he always justified his corruption to himself.
“I take a bit off the top – but I HELP THE PEOPLE”.
They are all like that bobby b – all the Democrats and RINOs, “I may take a bit off the top – but I help the people”.
That is how they live with themselves – in spite of all their crimes.
If they ever, even for a second, accepted the possibility that statism HURTS the people – their whole mental universe would collapse.
They can never stop – not even American cities turn into layers of Hell (which they are), because to stop with the ever more government spending and ever more regulations would mean THEIR ENTIRE LIVES have done nothing but harm.
Not just the corruption – but EVERYTHING they have done in their lives.
That is why they can never stop bobby b – even if no one was bribing them, no one at all.
They have to go on and on – till they totally destroy society, still screaming to themselves “I am doing good – I am helping the people”.
If they stop and think – then everything in their whole lives is revealed to them as HARM.
Do you think that even Nancy Pelosi wants to know that “the world would have been a much better place – had I never been born”.
They can not stop – they can not stop. Because then they might start to think.
Paul, I just think that you ascribe much more moral agency to those people than I can. For many, including Biden, I doubt that the concept of – the need for – “doing good” ever enters their minds. It’s more like “I’m doing well – the people like me . . .” By their system of the world – advancing in a political world – their rewards are enough to make them feel that they must be good. Progressive Calvinists?
I don’t think he ever tries to justify his own corruption to himself because it’s not a concept that occurs to him. He’s living by the rules he’s always known, people are rewarding him for it, and there’s no right or wrong – just “it works.”
It’s sort of funny – you’re warning me that I’m not ascribing enough of his principles to evil, and I’m saying that he has no principles and so is evil. Not so much of a disagreement.
bobby b – it is hard to know for sure.
When we die and if (a big “if” in my case) we get to go upstairs – then we will know what was in these Democrat (and RINO) minds.
Till then I am just guessing.
‘Tis possible, Ms Psaki may have held on to the job for so long because no one else wants to seen telling such porkies on an industrial scale. Whenever I see the lady, I sense that she is dodging issues on an epic scale–even she must know that her boss is not up to the task.
Patrick Crozier (March 20, 2022 at 11:28), I came across that ex-drug-addict-written article on Hunter Biden that I mentioned above: How I Switched From Never-Trump To Never-Biden.