The central hypocrisy of President Joe Biden’s indictment of the “MAGA Republicans”—as well as the Nancy Pelosi-picked panel on Jan. 6—is all the evidence of liberals and Democrats being “election deniers.”
Republicans are questioning election results and democracy is at risk. However, all that the Democrats say or do should be regarded as exercises in ideallism.
In Tuesday’s Biden press briefing, Fox White House reporter Peter Doocy started to point out what press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted in 2016.
She said, “Oh, I knew this was coming.” Doocy said, “You tweeted Trump stole an election. You tweeted Brian Kemp stole an election. If denying election results is extreme now, why wasn’t it then?”
On Dec. 17, 2016, almost six weeks after Donald Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton, Jean-Pierre tweeted, “Stolen emails, stolen drone, stolen election … welcome to the world of #unpresidented Trump.”
On April 2, 2020—about 17 months after Stacey Abrams lost her election in Georgia—Jean-Pierre tweeted over an MSNBC video link: “Reminder: Brian Kemp stole the gubernatorial election from Georgians and Stacey Abrams.” Why so late? Liberals at the time suggested Kemp was a GOP COVID-19 mass killer like Trump.
Jean-Pierre tried to call the comparison “ridiculous,” that she “was talking specifically at that time of what was happening with voting rights and the—what was in danger of voting rights.”
This does not change anything. The hypocrisy continues. The only leg these liberals have to stand on is they didn’t riot at the Capitol. They spent most of Trump’s presidency treating him as a Russian-imposed fraud, but that’s somehow not being a dangerous “election denier.”
Conservatives quickly pointed out that the obvious was obvious: If the press secretary knew this question for a long time, then why was the answer so insufficient?
Then ABC’s “The View”—the platform where common sense goes to die—attempted to defend this hypocrisy. Whoopi Goldberg argued those tweets were just fine, since “she was part of MoveOn.org. She was not an elected official. She was doing her part as an American citizen saying how she felt about an election.” It was her “freedom of speech.”
Millions of “election deniers” are private citizens exercising free speech. That didn’t prevent Biden from attacking them as a rhetorical disaster-movie earthquake shaking the foundations of democracy. But new faux-conservative “View” panelist Alyssa Farah Griffin suggested Doocy’s comparison was “apples and basketballs.”
It gets more ridiculous. Goldberg added not only was Jean-Pierre a “private citizen,” she “wasn’t even on television.” That is blatantly false. In her MoveOn days she proudly claimed that she was a MSNBC political analyst and appeared on CNN with Don Lemon. In 2017, she railed against Trump on Joy Reid’s show for supposedly hating black women, that “he now sits behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, essentially defecating on women.”
In November of 2019, when NBC’s “Today” gushed over Jean-Pierre’s memoir “Moving Forward,” co-host Craig Melvin told viewers, “You can also catch her on MSNBC just about every day.” That’s not a “private citizen.”
It’s a rollicking part of our democracy that Democrats seek to keep their minority voters activated and lining up to vote by scaring them relentlessly about Republican conspiracies of “Jim Crow” voter suppression and wanting to “put y’all back in chains,” to quote then-Vice President Biden.
The “independent fact checkers” fail to pounce, and the Big Tech platforms won’t squash them for “disinformation” and dangerous election-denier messaging.
Karine Jean-Pierre was just acting like any other cynical liberal playing the game. Doocy could have asked her this question when Jen Psaki took over in May. Her answer would have just been as lame back then.
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