Oh dear. So disheartening.

Jonathan Chait is a policy analyst and pundit who has, in the course of only writing for progressive and Axis publications and offering opinions on similar platforms in the broadcast news realm, has shown himself capable of principled disagreement with his party (guess which) and progressive cant. On the other hand, he is Trump Deranged, as he demonstrated the last time I criticized him. Then he wrote regarding the first stupid “No Kings” protest in June, “The No Kings protests appear to be a massive success.” (My comment: “Success at what?“) But Chait is clearly intelligent and capable of perceptive analysis, which is why the tweet above is so disturbing aside from the fact that it forces me to again think about Karine Jean-Pierre.

She’s on a book tour hyping her memoir of looking like a fool almost every day as Joe Biden’s paid liar for two years, “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines.” Jean-Pierre describes what she considers the Democratic Party’s betrayal of Joe Biden: “I watched Democratic leadership abandon, and in the end betray, a man who’d led our country through a pandemic and a time of historic political turmoil,” she writes.

Jean-Pierre’s gimmick is that she claims to be so outraged that the party pushed Biden to step aside as the Presidential nominee after his Presidential debate meltdown against Donald Trump, and that it “couldn’t articulate the achievements of the Biden/Harris administration well enough” that she has decided to leave the Democratic Party and become a political independent.

Talk about chutzpah: this woman is estopped from complaining about anyone’s failure to articulate anything.

All of her interviews have been incoherent disasters, as anyone who watched her deal with the White House press corps would expect. Chait’s question was triggered by a recent New Yorker interview. When the interviewer pressed Karine on an incomprehensible statement, she protested that her subtitle “A Look Inside a Broken White House” referred not to the Biden White House, where she worked, but the Trump White House, regarding which she has no special insights at all. Throughout the interview, she makes no sense. Take this exchange:

 New Yorker: You lay out very clearly why you think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. And, at the same time, you are suggesting that what happened in those three weeks was so serious that you had to leave the Democratic Party, even at this moment of grave threat. You said that the Party was trying to undermine Biden. What do you think they were doing and why?

Karine: Well, I mean, I just laid it out. I just said that there was an obvious campaign. You just had to watch.

New Yorker: Sure, but why were they doing that?

[Hint: Because he was senile, and the debate proved it.]

Karine: Because they believed that he needed to step aside. There’s more to this than just that period of time. This is very layered, right? There’s a period of time that I questioned what was happening and how do we treat our own, how do we treat people who are decent people? And then you also have to think about how I’m thinking about this as a Black woman who is part of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and living in this time where I also don’t think Democrats right now, Democrats’ leadership, is protecting vulnerable people in the way that it should.

Oh. What???

New Yorker: Sorry, I’m not trying to be dense. I’m a little unclear about what this has to do with Democratic leaders and many Democrats in the country thinking that Joe Biden was going to lose to Donald Trump—which was what the polls all showed—and therefore thinking that he should be replaced.

Karine: O.K., wait a minute. Hold on a second. Nobody knows anything. Nobody knows what would’ve happened. People also thought that if you replace Joe Biden we were going to win, or have a better chance of winning. Millions of people who showed up in 2020 didn’t show up in 2024. We can’t forget that there was an incumbency issue as well. This is real. There are, like, several G-10 countries with incumbents who did not get re-elected. There was an incumbency issue as well.

New Yorker: I’m not sure what you’re saying.

Welcome to Karine Jean-Pierre World!

Karine: No, no, no. Wait a minute. You are saying that this was their thinking, and they were kind of predicting. But nobody knew what was going to happen. Nobody knew that Joe Biden was going to win in 2020. Nobody knew what was going to happen in 2024. People believed in their hearts that Kamala was going to win. They believed it. They saw the polling and they thought she was going to win, looking at the polling. Nobody knew anything. I’m only bringing up the polls because you brought up the polls to me.

Whatever.

So now Jonathan Chait is asking why this idiot was appointed as the White House spokesperson and remained there despite her stunning incompetence? Her stupidity and incompetence were literally on display for two long years: where was Chait then? You know: he was covering for the Biden administration and his team. Jean-Pierre’s fumbling the New Yorker interview didn’t add anything to what we already knew about her, including the obvious answer to Chait’s question. Why was she hired? Because she is a gay black woman, that’s why. For the same reason Kamala Harris was selected as Biden’s Vice-President. For the same reason Biden never fired the many incompetents he ended up with in his Cabinet: his Secretary of Transportation was inept but gay; his Secretary of Defense went AWOL but was black; his Homeland Security Secretary was a lying boob but was Hispanic. The Biden Administration emphasized group identification over merit and competence, and no one personified that warped and unethical position more than Karine Jean-Pierre.

Chait’s sudden decision to question her competence now that she is criticizing, however vapidly, his favorite party is a tell: he revealed that as a supposedly objective analyst, he can’t be trusted. Jonathan Chait is a partisan hack, just one who is smarter than most. Not sufficiently smart, however, to avoid alerting the world that bias has made him stupid.