Psaki’s Senioritis

Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we provide a second opinion on what ails Jen Psaki, a cheerier prognosis for an Elon Musk-led Twitter, and hit more media misses. 

Psaki Bombing

Jen Psaki is, once again, living her best life.

When Psaki began her gig as White House press secretary, she was invincible.

After her very first briefing last January, Brian Karem of Playboy wrote that Psaki had “mastered subtlety and professionalism.” “Psaki Bomb” trended on Twitter on a weekly basis. CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter’s Reliable Sources produced the following chyron:

But then, things got hard. The president was not able to follow through on his foolhardy promise to “shut down the virus.” Americans continued dying from the virus and the Taliban took over in Afghanistan. Prices at the grocery store and the pump started ticking — and then skyrocketing — upward. Now Psaki’s boss is by some metrics more unpopular than his predecessor at this point in their respective presidencies. 

And so Psaki is getting ready to say sayonara to her post at the White House. It’s an open secret that she’s taking her talents to the land of Joy Reid and Yamiche Alcindor over at MSNBC, raising significant ethical issues over the access she gives to her future employer while she negotiates a contract with them.

Psaki is opting for the higher-paying, less stressful, more polemical TV gig, and who can blame her? Really, in a vacuum, good for her and her family! But aside from the ethical concerns, there are also political ones for the Biden administration to be found with the move, as the lines between employee of the executive branch and professional progressive people-pleaser blur.

Take for example, Psaki’s decision to not only appear at a Pod Save America event at the Wharf in the nation’s capital, but to make news at it by doubling down on President Biden’s declaration that Fox News’s Peter Doocy is a “stupid son of a b****,” with the added caveat that it might not be entirely his fault.

“He works for a network that provides people with questions that, nothing personal to any individual including Peter Doocy, but might make anyone sound like a stupid son of a bitch,” explained the subtle and professional Psaki. How refreshing. Stelter defended Psaki by diagnosing her with a case of senioritis. “Remember in senior year, spring of your senior year, you’re about to graduate and you’re just tired of all this?” asked Stelter. “I think we’re seeing that from Jen Psaki.” Ah, well then.

In 2017, Stelter said that a tweet from the former president claiming that Fox News is “MUCH more important in the United States than CNN,” and asserting that “outside of the U.S., CNN International is still a major source of (Fake) news . . .” represented an “invitation to harass” journalists. 

Senioritis may be partly to blame for her ill-advised slip of the tongue — as well as her increasingly lackadaisical approach at the podium, especially in responding to questions, oftentimes from Doocy, about his knowledge of and involvement in his son’s business activities — but Psaki and the administration she serves also suffer from a kind of environment-driven narcissism that leaves them unable to adjust to changing political realities. 

They look at the polls and they simply don’t believe them — the president has said as much — mostly because they live and work in the bluer-than-blue D.C. bubble that serves mostly to tell them how good and important and good at being important they are. Why not cut a little loose at the Wharf and drop a patent-pending Psaki Bomb? Everyone loves those, Twitter and the Pod Bros told her so.

Jen Psaki is leaving for greener pastures, in more ways than one, but the blissfully unaware attitude she brought to her job at the White House will endure at 1600 Penn. 

Headline Fail of the Week

Axios, that paragon of journalistic objectivity and cool, dispassionate analysis, proclaims that by making an offer to buy the whole of Twitter, “Elon Musk Goes into Full Goblin Mode,” which, it goes on to explain, can turn him into a “very dangerous beast.” 

In a tweet, it explained that “the world’s richest man — someone who used to be compared to Marvel’s Iron Man — is increasingly behaving like a movie supervillain, commanding seemingly unlimited resources with which to finance his mischief-making.’ It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a supervillain, it’s . . . a mischief-maker!

The overstated consequences are only outdone by the countless contrasting analogies. 

Media Misses

–Washington Post columnist Max Boot shared his own alarmist take on the potential of Elon Musk acquiring Twitter: 

–Ibram X. Kendi, a professor at Boston University well-known for peddling so-called “antiracist” theory, penned an op-ed for The Atlantic over the weekend calling the GOP the “party of white supremacy.” He adds that the GOP is not the “party of parents” and that such suggestions are on the scale of “the great lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.” 

He goes on to accuse the GOP of “making it harder for all of these kids to learn about themselves and their histories”:

–Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) came under fire last week after she shared a video of two people singing Christian songs on a plane and wrote: “I think my family and I should have a prayer session next time I am on a plane. How do you think it will end?”

Several Republican candidates fired back at Omar, who is Muslim, saying Muslims can and do pray in public in the U.S.