Tag: jay carney

#rsrh. Ah. Jay Carney. Poor fellow… well, nobody made him take that job.

Joseph Curl of the Washington Times enjoyed almost as much as I did watching Jay Carney burn little pieces of his soul off last week over the stupid stuff that President Obama said about judicial review:

…sometimes, you find someone guided by voices ready to say whatever needs to be said from the White House podium. A degree from Yale doesn’t matter then, it’s wriggle out as best you can. And only in Washington can you be sure to get away with simply blaming the press.

Which is just what former “reporter” Jay Carney did this week in a shameless — and, really, quite embarrassing — display of petty partisan PR. But finally, his one-time colleagues called him out on his meandering mendacity, and it was, in a word, hilarious.

Continue reading #rsrh. Ah. Jay Carney. Poor fellow… well, nobody made him take that job.

#rsrh QotD, I Knew That This Day Would Come Edition.

Bill Plante of CBS News – yes, one of the Big Three – upon hearing White House Press Secretary Jay Carney yet again try to spin away the fact that President Obama said something extremely stupid Monday about judicial review:

“What he said on Monday was an obvious misspoken moment, because he talked about the Court not being in the position to overturn acts of Congress. You‘re standing up there twisting yourself in knots because he made a mistake and you can’t admit it.”

More here, including the video (H/T: AoSHQ). Some of you are shocked: personally, I am not. I have long taken the position that the Media’s favorite story is The God Who Turned Out To Be A Man After All; when push comes to shove they hunger for that story, and quiver with eagerness to tell it. As the President will be discovering, this go-round.

Moe Lane

PS: Yes, the press loves Obama. Just like I love a grilled ribeye, cooked medium, with a side of mashed potatoes and steamed green beans, and don’t stint on the butter.

Jay Carney’s ‘shuck-and-jive.’

Hey.  It’s a direct quote, OK?

Alternate title: Jay Carney is starting to crack under the strain.

Two thoughts about this:

  1. Apparently – and contra Andrew Cuomo – you can shuck and jive at an Obama press conference after all.
  2. I do not look forward with some interest to seeing how Pam Spaulding of Pandagon (and the above Huffington Post/Talking Points Memo writer, and every other person who freaked out about the Cuomo thing during the 2008 election) manages the mental readjustment necessary to simultaneously excuse attacking a white Hillary Clinton supporter for using the term then, while forgiving a white Obama staffer for using the term now. That’s because I can’t see how such a readjustment can be done without some form of trepanning.

Hey. Live by the hardline attitude on language, die by it. Not my fault.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

#rsrh QotD, I’d Pay A Buck To See That edition.

The Gormogons, on White House Press Secretary Jay Carney’s coming crackup:

Carney must realize that this point that he is walking a plank. He knows the press is better informed than he is, and that any good, solid statement he makes will be contradicted within the hour by someone else in the White House. One of these days—and trust the Czar on matters like this—Carney is simply going to show up to a press conference in a sweatshirt, three or four beers in him, and just shrug off every question with “What the hell do I care?”

My sympathy is zero, by the way.  He voluntarily took that job, after all.

Moe Lane

#rsrh QotD, And From The Wall Street Journal, No Less edition.

Stephen Moore, reacting perhaps just a bit hostilely to Jay Carney’s… look, I’ll get into it after the quote:

Economic bimboism is rampant in Washington.

And Carney’s one of the bimbos, apparently.  What seems to have set this off was Carney’s rather snotty response to Moore’s colleague Laura Meckler; Meckler had asked the very reasonable question about how subsidizing people to not work actually creates jobs.   The problem is that it’s only a reasonable question if you’re not personally and politically invested in Keynesian economic theory… which Carney proceeded to demonstrate by rudely suggesting that Meckler’s question called her right to work at the WSJ in question.  He then duckspoke the standard Keynesian line that subsidizing the unemployed gives them money to spread through the system, thus indirectly creating jobs.  That this rosy model assumes that government acts as a perfect fiscal superconductor* is lost on Carney, but not on Stephen Moore** – who proceeds to go off on Carney, then macroeconomics in general.

Continue reading #rsrh QotD, And From The Wall Street Journal, No Less edition.

#rsrh Jay Carney and the Age of Scrutiny.

Via Yid With Lid (via AoSHQ Headlines), permit me to sum up Jay Carney’s… evolving… narrative:

  • 2001’s Jay Carney, Times reporter: Man, that George W Bush is such a big poopyhead for pretending to work when he’s really just taking a vacation.  And, oh, yeah: he’s pro-business and anti-environmental.  Isn’t that just awful?
  • 2011’s Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary and Daily Chew Toy: Man, that Barack Obama really needs his vacation – besides, everybody knows that the job follows the President everywhere he goes.  That’s why he can keep that laser-like focus on the economy and jobs – he’s pro-business, you know – even at Martha’s Vinyard…

Am I being cruel?  Well, yes, but it doesn’t really count with White House Press Secretaries.  Their job is to go up onto the podium every day and see whether the media will run out of throwing knives before the press secretaries run out of hemoglobin.  This administration typically doesn’t assign people to the job that they would actually mind losing, so why should I show any more consideration? Continue reading #rsrh Jay Carney and the Age of Scrutiny.

#rsrh Jay Carney whines at reporters asking questions…

…no, really. I especially enjoyed the bit where Carney keeps nattering on about seventy minute sessions; seriously, dude. Everybody in this business knows that Obama can’t say “good morning” in less than five minutes – and that half of the time you’re left with the distinct impression that he’s not entirely certain that it isn’t, say, noon. I’m just saying that seventy minutes isn’t that much for getting semantic content out of the President, that’s all.

Of course, the thing keeping me from feeling too badly for those reporters is the knowledge that most of them were actively engaged in creating a situation where Jay Carney could whine at them about their awful habit of asking questions.

White House: We don’t know nothing about nothing.

Call an expert.

This exchange between Jake Tapper, ABC Senior White House Correspondent, and Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary is, bluntly, bizarre.

For context: Jake is asking Carney about, naturally enough, the situation with the nuclear reactor problem in Japan. Specifically, the most recent details about the nuclear reactor problem, given that both the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the Japanese government are both keeping mum on the subject. The standard procedure for a Press Secretary who doesn’t have the answer to a question like that? “Well, Jake, that’s a good question and I’ll get back to you on that.” Which is a weasel, but it’s a successful weasel because that’s also the answer that you give when you really don’t know the answer.

Carney went… elsewhere. Continue reading White House: We don’t know nothing about nothing.

#rsrh This is NOT painful to watch.

Mostly because Jay Carney‘s a shifty little weasel – yeah, even by the standards of White House spokesman, which is renowned as having (under Democratic administrations, at least) some of the most mealy-mouthed, two-faced posturing buffoons in government service.  Speaking of Bobby Gibbs… he probably watched this exchange between Carney and CBS guy Chip Reid over the President’s inability to actually say or do anything useful about Libya, popped open a beer, and said to himself Thank God I got out when I did.

Here’s the text (via Fox News, via Ace of Spades) as to why:

Q Doesn’t there come a point to make a — where you have to make a decision?

MR. CARNEY: And I would go back to what I said to Jill, that we have acted with great haste, and we have coordinated international — led and coordinated an international response, the likes of which the world has never seen in such a short period of time. And we have — we continue to consult with our international partners. We meet — we have met with, as the Secretary of State did, with the Libyan opposition discussing new ways we can put pressure on Qaddafi.

And when it comes to considering military options, this President will always be mindful of what the mission, should it be engaged, what it entails, the risks that it poses to our men and women in uniform, and its likelihood of having the kind of impact that we set out for it to have. And that is his responsibility as Commander-in-Chief.

And I would suggest to you that that is what leadership is all about.

Suggest away, Sparky.  Suggest away.

Moe Lane