I would hope that even the most Trump-Deranged Democrat would agree that it will be a multilateral boon to have a White House spokesperson who is minimally competent even at the unethical main function of the job (that is, lying), rather than the current embarrassing occupant, Karine Jean-Pierre. She routinely demonstrates poor reasoning abilities and barely rudimentary comprehension of ethics as well as the Constitution; she is slow-witted, inarticulate, frequently unprepared and unprofessional.

I wonder if said Trump-Deranged Democrat might even agree that it will be a welcome change to have a President in office willing to fire someone he hired who hasn’t broken the law while holding a job in the administration (like Sam Brinton). I can’t swear that my research is conclusive, but so far, I’ve found no record of Biden dismissing anyone who was appointed, nominated or hired under his authority unless they were criminals. I am confident that this is an all-time record, and an ugly one, with Jean-Pierre standing as the poster girl for Biden’s acceptance of mediocrity (or worse) in government service.

This is the petard of DEI hiring: a President who makes “historic” selections based on group membership rather than ability is thereafter trapped: the hiring announces that what matters most is the sex, sexual preference, gender, race and/or ethnicity of the individual rather than that individual’s performance in the job. When my sister was complaining about Trump’s major agency nominations, I responded that if any of them proved to be disasters, he or she would be fired….unlike Pete Buttigeig, Tony Blinken, Alejandro Mayorkas, Merrick Garland, Lloyd Austin, the head of the Secret Service, the director of FEMA and others, such as Jean-Pierre. She had to concede the point.

Karine was in top historically incompetent form yesterday as she tried to explain away President Biden’s decision to give a pardon of unprecedented range to his black sheep son, Hunter. “[The President] thought about it, and he weighed — it was not an easy decision to come to. And he put out a comprehensive, comprehensive statement. And I would certainly, you know, offer that up to folks out there who are wondering, I would say, please read the President’s response to this and full,” she said, and added, “I just laid out the president’s thinking. The President laid it out himself in his own words. He did. He laid out how he wrestled with this decision. He said in his statement, as a President, as a father, he talked about how difficult it was to make this decision. He thought about it this weekend. He did. He thought about that this weekend. He wrestled with it. And there are some, you know, factors, some real ones that he considered.”

This is how officials in our government make our citizens more ethically incompetent and dumb by example. Jean-Pierre defends the decision by saying that Biden “thought about it” and considered many factors—Gee, that’s nice! When did the number of factors taken into consideration in decision-making start justifying a bad decision?—and that it was a difficult decision to make.

In a dim mind like Karine’s, rationalizations rule. The latter was Rationalization19C. Murkowski’s Lament, or “It was a difficult decision.” Let’s see what I wrote about it (I don’t remember):

“Senator Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) official statement  on why she was voting against Justice Brett Kavanaugh after his ethics train wreck of a confirmation hearing brought this common rationalization into focus. Kavanaugh’s record as a judge would have had him automatically, unanimously confirmed by the Senate under any previous standards. To their undying shame, Democrats on the Senate judiciary committee allowed the traditional inquiry to become a circus, low-lighted by permitting a bizarre, three decades old #MeToo accusation regarding alleged (and unsubstantiated) attempted sexual assault (maybe) by Kavanaugh when he was in high school and a minor to breach all standards of fairness and due process. The episode represented the zenith of “believe all women” feminist cant. Murkowski, who has long tried to burnish her credentials as a Republican feminist, voted against Kavanaugh, an indefensible decision, and tried to gird herself against criticism by saying that “this has truly been the most difficult evaluation of a decision that I have ever had to make.” Well, too bad. You’re a Senator, and decisions that affect lives, careers and institutions are often difficult. Your job is to use valid analysis, dispassionate reasoning and critical thought to make good decisions, not to make bad ones and try to justify them by saying they were hard. How does the fact that a decision-maker almost made a better, more principled, more ethical decision make the wrong decision better or more palatable to those who suffer because of it? It doesn’t. Murkowski’s Lament attempts to use sympathy and pity to duck accountability.”

Ah! So that was the context. Well, the same definition applies to Karine’s fatuous response.

I don’t know if I can frame a rationalization that covers the “He put out a comprehensive statement” dodge. She wouldn’t have been getting grilled over Biden defying his own promise that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter if the “comprehensive statement” was comprehensive enough. The fact that an explanation is “comprehensive” doesn’t make it persuasive, honest, or right.

Later, under more questioning on the pardon, Jean-Pierre thought it was relevant and mitigating that Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) played a role in convincing President Biden to pardon his son Hunter.“This is Clyburn’s words: ‘The president was reticent’ when he tried to encourage him to pardon Hunter. … I think that’s important to note.” Oh. Why is that important to note? How does a President justify a decision based on who was trying to convince him to make it?

Rep. Clyburn is widely credited with saving Biden’s Presidential hopes in 2020 by supporting him before the crucial South Carolina primary. Was Karine saying that Biden feels obligated to take Clyburn’s advice even when he’s urging him to break a public promise? Has Clyburn been one of Biden’s puppeteers during the whole, awful, four years of his Presidency?

Karine has flagged a missing rationalization with this one, though it is a rationalization that I thought vanished with adulthood: “He told me to do it!” Mother’s response to that, as most of us learned when we were about eight-years-old, is “If he told you to jump out the window, would you do that too?”