Psaki struggles to conceal Biden’s blunders, just like Pinocchio.
Jen Psaki is big on truth.
On her first day as President Biden’s White House press secretary, she declared from the podium: “When the president asked me to serve in this role, we talked about the importance of bringing truth and transparency back to the briefing room.”
Biden agreed, saying that same day: “Communicating directly and truthfully to the American people is one of the most important duties of a President.”
Of course, it is.
So how does the insufferably self-righteous Ms. Psaki now explain that in her own new book, she tells a weapons-grade whopper of a lie about her boss?
Psaki claimed that Biden didn’t look at his watch during the ceremony at Dover for 13 US soldiers killed during the botched Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021.
Yet we all know that is a lie, because we all saw him do it.
News cameras caught him looking at his watch at least twice during the ceremony, and families of the dead soldiers said that he did it many more times.
Darin Hoover, father of Marine Staff Sgt. Taylor Hoover, told Sean Hannity: “They would release the salute and he looked down at his watch on every last one. All 13, he looked down at his watch.”
Mark Schmitz, father of Marine Lance Cpl. Jared Schmitz, corroborated Hoover’s story, saying: “I actually leaned into my son’s mother’s ear, and I said, I swear to God, if he checks his watch one more time … and that was only probably four times in. I couldn’t look at him anymore after that, just considering, especially, the time and why we were there. I found it to be the most disrespectful thing I’ve ever seen.”
So, the truth and transparency about that day really matters to those families who rightly felt incredibly upset by the president’s weird behaviour.
Yet Psaki wrote in her book that it never happened.
Instead, it was all media “misinformation” peddled by Biden critics.
Yes, we pesky journalists didn’t know what we saw with our own eyes, apparently.
Nor, according to Psaki, did the families of the dead soldiers in attendance.
And nor did the American people who watched him do it on television.
Instead, Psaki insisted that Biden only looked at his watch after the ceremony finished.
And that, ironically, was the real misinformation.
Now, after she was exposed for the lie by news website Axios, Psaki issued a statement saying, “Detail in a few lines of the book about the exact number of times he looked at his watch will be removed in future reprints and the ebook.”
But there was no apology for this shameful attempt to rewrite history.
And this unedifying episode speaks to a far bigger and even more shameless ongoing campaign to protect President Biden from the truth.
Time and again, we see his apologists at the White House and in the Democrat Party, or on cable news networks like MSNBC – where Psaki has a show – try to not only defend the indefensible but to pretend we haven’t seen what we’ve seen with our own eyes.
They tell us Biden’s fully in control of his mental and physical faculties when he talks utter drivel in public, reads out teleprompter marks in speeches, calls out for dead people in audiences, says “God save the Queen” eight months after he attended her funeral, falls off bicycles, tumbles down the steps of Air Force One, or face-plants on stages.
They even lie about his massive foreign policy gaffes.
When Biden called for regime change in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, saying of Vladimir Putin, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” the White House denied he meant regime change even though that’s exactly what he said.
And when he announced the US would defend Taiwan militarily if China attacked it, apparently ending decades of ambiguous non-commitment on that kind of intervention and sparking fury from the Chinese, the White House raced to clarify he didn’t mean what we just heard him say.
Biden joins in the disingenuous truth-denying nonsense.
When a reporter asked him in December why he was losing to Trump in the polls, Biden replied, “You’re reading the wrong polls!”
But the polls then showed him losing, and the polls now show him losing even more.
And I’m sure the main reason for this is that the American people are sick of being told the sky is blue when they can look out the window and see it’s grey.
The reality about Biden’s presidency is that it lacks both truth and transparency.
In a CNN interview he conducted last week, the president told 15 lies in 17 minutes – nearly one a minute! – about everything from the economy and immigration to inflation and Gaza.
Yet out came his defenders to clean up his mess again, desperately spinning the words that come out of his mouth to mean the opposite of what we saw and heard him say.
And what makes all this so much more ludicrous is that at the same time they’re doing all this, the fork-tongued Biden protectors are shrieking 24/7 that America’s democracy must be saved from the big bad orange liar, Donald Trump, and his basket of deplorable supporters.
When former RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel was recently stopped from joining NBC by an internal staff revolt, Jen Psaki was very clear what the problem was:
“Look, this is not about Republicans versus Democrats,” she said. “This is about truth versus lies.”
That self-righteous claptrap has never sounded hollower.
Frankly, when it comes to truth and transparency, I don’t think I’ll take lectures from Pinocchio Psaki.