MATT TAIBBI: Karine Jean-Pierre Writes History’s Most Incoherent Memoir.
The core complaint in Independent is that apart from a “brief reprieve” in 2020, when the summer of Floyd saw “literature such as White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo gaining in popularity,” America has shown itself to be simply too backward to recognize the essential superiority of candidates like Harris. Even so, Jean-Pierre insists, Democrats could have done more to help. “When critics said Harris didn’t know anything about foreign policy,” she wrote, “Democrats should have emphasized how she’d worked closely with our partners in Asia as well as African nations like Ghana, Zambia, and Tanzania.”
Democrats could have spent $100 billion a second on ads emphasizing Kamala’s cooperation with Zambia and Tanzania, and they wouldn’t have been able to compete with videos like the one below:
Jean-Pierre’s thesis is also just wrong. Trump was far from a juggernaut. He left office in 2021 with a 62% disapproval rating and trailed Captain Dodderpants for virtually all of 2022 and 2023. If Harris had been a good or even a middling candidate, she easily could have won. However, she was handcuffed both by her own peculiarities and the huge Gobstopper-sized zit in the middle of the Democratic Party’s forehead, which grew out of years of denials that the chief executive was a vegetable. Videos featuring Jean-Pierre figured heavily in the growth of that Gobstopper.
She raged at reporters, not even conservatives, for asking rational questions. The scene below took place in July last year, in the wake of a post-debate New York Times report that Biden saw a neurologist. Jean-Pierre had been caught not telling the truth about this, and when correspondents like AP’s Zeke Miller and Ed O’Keefe of CBS pushed her, she flipped out. Her evasions were comical, implying Presidents might have casual contact with a physician more easily than a layperson because the doctor is just down the hall as opposed to a “public transportation” ride away, while acting like reporters were being unreasonable in not accepting that a “verbal check-in” with a neurologist specializing in Parkinson’s Disease is different from a “medical exam.” Watch how calm and accommodating Miller in particular is (he’s the first reporter in the video), yet Jean-Pierre eventually rips even him for “not okay” questioning:
[Video at Link – Ed]
Jean-Pierre had over a year to think about what to say about all this, and instead of writing the book the whole world wanted, the true story (complete with photos of Biden’s used-bib collection and pictorial toilet guides) of her frustration at having to be the public face of one of the most obvious and legally perilous cons in American political history, she denied there was anything to cover up, much less that she had responsibility for it. Then she announced she was “fed up” with a country too racist to accept a cabbage-president, before offering her prescription for success in politics. “People,” she wrote unironically, “want authenticity.”
For sure, there are seriously goofy Trump administration characters. There continues however to be a massive underappreciation for the number of true lunatics escaped from the just-completed Biden period. The whole issue of Biden’s competence is under investigation and may eventually become a criminal matter, making it even more amazing that someone like Jean-Pierre would write a memoir at all, much less one this detached from reality. Is politics just a jobs program for crazy people? I don’t know how to read this book and conclude anything else.
Next up for the wrath of KJP? Biden’s former press secretary launches extraordinary attack on George Clooney for saying what everyone thought about ailing former president.
Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre blasted actor George Clooney in her new book for writing a high-profile essay telling Joe Biden to drop out of last year’s presidential election.
In July 2024, Clooney penned a guest essay for the New York Times in which he described seeing an ailing Biden in the run-up to the election.
‘When I woke up, the piece was there, splayed across the pages of The New York Times. The headline? “George Clooney: I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee,” Jean-Pierre wrote in in her book, Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines.
‘I read it in disbelief.’
Which means that KJP is actually angry with Obama, who was desperately looking to secure a fourth term in the White House: “A political mole told RadarOnline.com it was Obama who urged Clooney to call for Biden – his own vice president – to end his sputtering campaign, fearing the fallout if he did it himself.”
KJP’s book may be titled Independent, but she’s not going to risk burning any bridges with her party’s biggest grandees.