As if fact-checking wasn’t already bad enough, meet the new truthfulness gatekeeper at MSNBC: Jen Psaki.
Seriously. Stop laughing, everyone.
According to The Wrap, the former White House press secretary for President Joe Biden told an audience at a conference in Beverly Hills, California, that her new MSNBC show will be dedicated to “debunking things, calling out BS.”
“First of all, my business is not rage,” Psaki said Wednesday at Vox Media’s Code Conference.
“What I hope to do is bring that passion for explaining things, debunking things, calling out BS when you see it to my next job,” she said.
The streaming series doesn’t drop until 2023 — but if you need a preview, Psaki went on to demonstrate just how dedicated to calling out BS she was.
The Wrap reported that Psaki “called analysis that saw Biden’s speech Thursday as partisan ‘bizarre,’ noting that ‘there’s a tactical component of what he’s saying publicly … but it’s not a reflection of a change in his view.’”
Just so we’re clear, this is the speech we’re talking about — the one where he calls “MAGA Republicans” a foundational threat to our democracy:
“Equality and Democracy are under assault. We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise,” says President Biden, at the beginning of his remarks tonight.
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.” pic.twitter.com/Yc9sdolykO
— CBS News (@CBSNews) September 2, 2022
Unity. pic.twitter.com/AtjFb2B0pN
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) September 2, 2022
Psaki’s business might not be rage, but the president’s certainly was — at least last week. “MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution,” he told America.
“They do not believe in the rule of law,” Biden said. “They do not recognize the will of the people … MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.
“They promote authoritarian leaders, and they fan the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.”
Don’t call that kind of rhetoric partisan, though. Otherwise, Jen Psaki is going to have to debunk your bizarre BS. Capisce?
Of course, Psaki herself left no doubt in attendees’ minds as to whether she was partisan. Spoiler alert: Yeah. Duh.
“I’m not trying to hide from what my past experiences are,” she said.
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“I very publicly worked for the last president,” Psaki added. “I also will be transparent about what I believe — I mean, I did some work for Planned Parenthood, I very much believe that women should have the right to make choices. I’m not going to hide that when I’m on television.”
Look, far be it from anyone to expect much from MSNBC, the network that’s given Chris Hayes and Al Sharpton sinecure slots for years. However, Psaki’s new show sounds distinctly like a fact-checking “Mythbusters” for politics. To promote it and prove she was the right person for the gig, she took to the stage and insisted that calling a nakedly partisan speech a partisan speech was “bizarre” analysis and admitted, more or less, that she’s a committed ideologue.
Again, we’re supposed to take this affront seriously.
As Jim Geraghty pointed out at National Review, now that “we’re about to enter the era of Jen Psaki, fact-checker,” we should probably look at her performance as White House press secretary for a glimpse of what might be in store.
“I expect this means we’ll get more declarations that the CDC director offers separate personal assessments of health policies, that President Biden meant to say the opposite of what he actually said, that the White House doesn’t have a view on whether it’s wrong to leak drafts of Supreme Court decisions, that it is ‘unfair and absurd’ for companies to increase costs on consumers in response to higher tax rates, that anyone who criticizes a Biden speech is proving that the president struck a nerve, or that the supply-chain crisis is mostly a matter of treadmill deliveries being delayed,” Geraghty wrote.
If you want an accurate, brief summation of some of Psaki’s better dissembling while in the employ of the White House, you can’t do much better than that.
And with that track record, MSNBC thought what she really needed to be doing on her new show was fact-checking.
Nice work, everyone involved.
