Psaki has done well, however …

Having said already that Jen Psaki should resign her job as White House press secretary after allegedly accepting a job offer to work as a commentator for MSNBC, I feel a need to give her a thumbs-up for the job she has done speaking for the Biden administration.

She has performed admirably. The juxtaposition of the job she has done compared to jobs done by the four people who preceded her in the previous administration prove my point.

You had Sean Spicer, whose first press briefing was devoted to blasting the media for its reporting of the crowd that attended Donald Trump’s inaugural in January 2017; it went downhill from there. Then you had Sarah Sanders, who would later admit to telling lies to the press. Then came Stephanie Grisham, who left her job in first lady Melania Trump’s press office only to never conduct a press briefing while serving as flack for the POTUS. Finally, there was Kayleigh McEnany, who blathered, blustered and lied her way before the media all the way to the end of Trump’s term in office.

Jen Psaki became press secretary for President Biden, and to my way of thinking, she has conducted herself with professionalism and resolve, particularly in the face of strong questioning from the media representatives before whom she stood in the White House press briefing room.

Speaking for a presidential administration is among the most challenging jobs one can imagine. They occasionally have to “clarify” statements that presidents make. At times they have to defend the indefensible; some of them do it admirably while others, well … don’t. They all — whether they work for Democrats or Republicans — face hostile questions. They have to maintain their composure.

Jen Psaki has managed to accomplish virtually all those goals during her time in the press room hot house.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Cruz proves his idiocy

(AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Ted Cruz deserves a special mention on this blog, given his shameful and disgraceful and despicable performance while questioning Supreme Court Justice-designate Ketanji Brown Jackson during her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I have made no secret of my loathing for the junior U.S. senator from Texas ever since he joined the Senate in 2013. He always has appeared to be grooming himself as a Republican presidential candidate. He took his best shot in 2016, losing the GOP nomination to the guy who eventually would win that year’s election.

I dubbed him the Cruz Missile because he seemed intent on blowing up every enemy he made along the way. The guy reportedly has few friends in the Senate.

He lectured Justice-designate Jackson on whether children are born racist and sought to paint her as soft on child pornographers and threw assorted red herrings at her during the time allotted for questioning. Granted, he wasn’t alone in behaving boorishly among Republican inquisitors. I just am feeling the urge to express my disgust at this clown who represents my interests in the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body.

Cruz is a coward. Why do I say that? Because the guy who once told the truth about Donald Trump — calling him a sniveling coward and an “amoral” politician — became a suck-up acolyte to the POTUS.

He also doesn’t give a damn about the people he represents. I have to point to the jaunt he sought to make with his family to Cancun while most of the state was freezing in February 2021 in that winter freeze that ended up killing hundreds of Texans.

Moreover, how much more “sniveling” can one get than to blame his daughters for the decision to flee to Mexico while Texans were freezing to death? That’s what Cruz did when he was outed for fleeing the state.

Ted Cruz ain’t among the best and brightest Texas can offer to serve in U.S. Senate. As he showed during the SCOTUS confirmation hearing, all this clown intended to do was prance, posture and preen for the GOP base that will nominate the next president of the United States.

God help us if it’s Ted Cruz.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Psaki should step down

Those critics of the Biden administration have a point in calling for press secretary Jen Psaki to resign her job as White House flack while awaiting a formal announcement that she is returning to cable TV news.

Psaki reportedly is close to signing a deal to join MSNBC as a commentator. Now, is that in itself a bum deal? No. It isn’t. However, she cannot perform the parallel role as spokeswoman for President Biden’s administration while waiting for new employer to make official what reportedly already is well-known among the Washington, DC press corps.

I believe Psaki has done a creditable job as press secretary. She has sought to give straight answers to straight questions. When she doesn’t know the answer, she has been fond of telling reporters that she is willing to “circle back” when she obtains the answers they seek. Nothing wrong at all with that.

She is now set to don some new proverbial attire as an MSNBC talking head. Psaki did work for CNN before joining the Biden administration in 2021, so it’s no big shakes that she would return to the fight with another network.

Psaki must not mix the two roles — as one who covers the news and one who on occasion makes the news. She is getting far too close to that line to make many of comfortable.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Anger pre-dates Trump

Donald Trump gets blamed for a lot of what is wrong about today’s political climate and I take a back seat to no one in expressing my loathing for the man and what he brought to the table when he entered political life in the summer of 2015.

However, I want to give the former A**hole in Chief a pass on something that’s been kicked around since his arrival on the political stage, which is that he introduced this era of intensely bitter feeling.

Wrong. It pre-dates Trump.

The actual bogeyman, in my view, happens to be the Republicans who ran for Congress on that Contract With America platform cobbled together by a back-bench House of Representative member by the name of Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich called the cadence to which the GOP insurgents marched. Gingrich infamously declared that he wanted Republican officeholders and candidates for public office to label “Democrats as the enemy of normal Americans.”

They did. You know what? That message worked with Americans who had grown angry with “politics as usual.” The Republicans took control of Congress after the 1994 midterm election and Gingrich got chosen by the GOP caucus as speaker of the House, where he continued his anti-other-party bombast.

The anger carried over into the 2000 election cycle and the balloting that resulted in George W. Bush being elected by the slimmest margin possible.

Donald Trump, therefore, inherited a climate already tilled and planted with all manner of antipathy. But it was Newt Gingrich who sowed the ground with a form of nastiness that enabled Trump to take it to the next level and perhaps even to the level after that.

Those of us who are old enough to remember how the major parties were able to work together for the common good likely want a return to the “good old days.”

Political adversaries need not become enemies.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Play ball … in Amarillo!

Hot diggedy, doggie! They’re going to play hardball in these United States of America. My friends up yonder in Amarillo are a happy bunch of folks, as their beloved Sod Poodles are commencing another season playing Double-A baseball.

The Sod Poodles are affiliated with the National League’s Arizona Diamondbacks. They won the Texas League pennant in their first season since moving to Amarillo in 2019 from San Antonio. The COVID pandemic wiped out the 2020 season; the team resumed play this past year, but finished out of the running for a second-straight pennant.

Now we have begun the 2022 season. Hodgetown, the shiny baseball park in downtown Amarillo, will be bustling once again with fans cheering and chanting their support for the Sod Poodles.

Once again, I will join my friends who will populate the ballpark watching the team play baseball.

Amarillo has proved itself to be a baseball community, given its support for the Soddies. The city response to this franchise has been gratifying to watch.

Play ball, Sod Poodles! I am rooting for you.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Stand tall, Tiger

Whether he slips on The Masters’s green jacket that goes to the winner of the golf tournament is irrelevant to what I want to say about Eldrick “Tiger” Woods.

The man has “won” a major battle already by returning to play competitive golf after suffering a grievous leg injury in a horrific motor vehicle crash. It occurred a little more than a year ago.

Tiger Woods could have lost his right leg. It was shattered in many places. Surgeons fitted Woods with metal pins and rods to keep his leg. A year later, Woods has completed two rounds of The Masters; he made the cut and will play for the green jacket over the weekend.

I am not going to predict he will win. Indeed, Tiger Woods likely won’t walk away wearing that coveted jacket … although I am not going to bet my retirement account on it.

My point is that even a fierce competitor such as Tiger Woods must feel a good bit of satisfaction that he is able to compete at a high level, given what he has endured for the past year.

I have noted already that Tiger Woods does not consider himself to be “bigger than the game” of golf. I can challenge that just a bit. His mere presence in The Masters field has generated fan interest that has been lacking because of his absence from the game he has dominated for the past quarter century.

Yep. Tiger is at least as big as the game. He has proven himself — once again this week — to be a winner.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Ronny Jackson: under suspicion

What does one make of this item? The U.S. House Ethics Committee — acting on a referral from an independent watchdog group — has decided to investigate a freshman Republican loudmouth congressman on unspecified (so far) ethics charges.

The loudmouth is Ronny Jackson, who moved to the Texas Panhandle a couple of years ago so he could run for Congress from the 13th Congressional District. Jackson has become something of a right-wing media darling, given his incessant Twitter barrage that makes profoundly stupid allegations against President Biden.

Jackson’s defense at the moment is that the referral to the House ethics panel comes from a so-called “liberal” outfit, the Office of Congressional Ethics, which he says makes a habit of targeting conservatives such as himself. What absolute crap!

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ethics-panel-reviewing-rep-ronny-jackson-e2-80-99s-campaign-spending/ar-AAVYS2L?ocid=uxbndlbing

I suppose I should point out that these allegations — whatever they might turn out to be — are part of Jackson’s modus operandi. Donald Trump nominated Jackson, a former White House physician and retired Navy admiral, to become secretary of Veterans Affairs. Jackson withdrew his name from consideration after allegations surfaced that Jackson (a) drank on the job, (b) harassed White House staffers sexually, and (c) was a bit too generous with prescription drugs.

He got elected to Congress in 2020 and began harping continually about Joe Biden’s mental acuity.

The guy is an embarrassment. However, right-wing media talkers love the guy; he’s a regular on the Fox News Channel, Newsmax and One America Network broadcasts.

He’s actually a dipsh** carpetbagger who masquerades as a dedicated public servant.

I have no clue what the ethics probe will reveal. I am willing to give him a smidgen of a benefit of the doubt, given that the OCE and the House ethics panel haven’t yet divulged what the complaints entail. However, a major part of me thinks there’s something amiss with this rookie loudmouth congressman.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Trump woulda marched?

So … Donald J. Trump says he would have marched with his fellow insurrectionists on 1/6 but the Secret Service detail told him he couldn’t go, that it posed too great a security risk.

Hmm. Let me think about that. Nah. I don’t believe him.

Trump’s latest proclamation about that horrible day reminds me of the time he said in the wake of a school shooting that he would have stormed the building with guns blazing had he been given the chance to end the massacre.

Armchair heroes, of course, can say all kinds of things. The Donald is known to say, umm, all kinds of things in all kinds of contexts.

Let’s remember that when he had the chance to fight for his country during the Vietnam War, he found a doctor who would diagnose that he had “bone spurs” that, as luck would have it, kept him from serving.

He keeps insisting that he told the so-called “massive” crowd to mark “peacefully” and “patriotically.” Yes, he spoke those words. What is most bizarre, though, is trying to understand why The Donald didn’t call off the rioters when they became violent as they stormed Capitol Hill. He remained stone-cold silent during the riot that sought to subvert Congress’s constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Sigh …

The man cannot tell the truth. Not ever!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

So much for cheering this big moment

Roy Blunt is a chump lame-duck Republican U.S. senator from Missouri who this past weekend declared to the world that Ketanji Brown Jackson’s pending confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court would be a high point in American history, as she would become the first Black woman to take her rightful place on the nation’s highest court.

Blunt then voted “no” on her confirmation.

What, then, did this GOP nimrod do when Vice President Kamala Harris declared that the Senate’s vote had officially confirmed Judge Jackson to the court? Blunt joined the rest of his GOP colleagues in walking out while the Democratic senators stood and applauded the history-making confirmation.

The only Republican to join the Democrats was Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, one of three GOP senators to vote to confirm Jackson; the other two, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, also walked out of the chamber.

I am singling out Blunt, though, because of his idiotic comments praising Judge Jackson’s legal skill, her educational background, her standing as a jurist, her obvious qualifications.

I was left to wonder: If she is all the things that Sen. Blunt said of her — which she is! — why in the name of political reason did he vote against her?

Roy Blunt, who is retiring from the Senate at the end of the year, demonstrated his true self by refusing to cheer for the history that the Senate made in confirming this eminently qualified Supreme Court appointee.

Disgusting!

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

Longing for old custom

There once was a time in Washington, D.C., when freshmen members of Congress — senators and House members — spent their first terms learning to locate the Capitol Hill restrooms, which they did without hardly ever uttering a word out loud.

Those days are gone. The media these days bestow instant celebrity status to congressional newbies. I wish we could silence some of them.

There were exceptions to the old way of senators and House members having to earn their way under the spotlight. I can think of Robert F. Kennedy, who took office as a senator from New York in 1965. He became an instant star, even though he never really liked serving in the Senate. The rest of ’em largely stayed quiet until they earned their spurs. Hillary Rodham Clinton took her Senate seat in 2001 as her husband was leaving the presidency. Indeed, Sen. Clinton was a household name — as was RFK — before she decided to seek elected public office.

These days? We get the likes of Republicans such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. I’ll lump at least one Democratic lawmaker, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, in that camp of instant celeb. The media seem to enjoy reporting on the things these people say, even when they make little sense.

Lately, too, we have heard from that GOP nut job Madison Cawthorn, who yapped about sex parties, bringing a dose of embarrassment to fellow Republicans in the House.

I fear this all is a consequence of social media. Everyone has a recording device on their “smart phones.” Whatever one can say is recorded instantly and shared with every human on Earth.

I guess I’ll just have to sigh out of frustration, knowing there ain’t a thing I can do to change the world in which we live. Maybe I’ll just have to learn to tune out the blatherings of these newcomers and listen more intently to those with actual governing experience.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

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