Question for Jen Psaki: can we at least call these Afghans “stranded” now?
One of today’s many disgusting developments from our new insect overlords the Taliban:
The Taliban said Tuesday that the group will not allow Afghan nationals to leave the country and opposes any extension of evacuation flights, a development that comes one week before U.S. and coalition forces are slated to depart Afghanistan.
Actually, I was unaware that the Taliban were previously allowing Afghans to leave.
At any rate, yesterday Psaki had objected to the use of the word “stranded” to describe Americans in the country, upbraiding Fox reporter Peter Doocy for employing the expression – an expression which of course is completely appropriate, but that doesn’t stop Psaki from exhibiting her faux sense of outraged integrity. How I detest these lying self-righteous apparatchiks:
PSAKI: "I think it's irresponsible to say Americans are stranded. They are not."
DOOCY: "'There are no Americans stranded' is the White House's official position on what's happening in Afghanistan right now?" pic.twitter.com/0FEq5VkO6V
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) August 23, 2021
I think Doocy should have said any number of things that he didn’t say in response. One might be:
“The word ‘stranded’ has a meaning, and it is appropriately used to mean unable to leave because of some problem or impediment. Until a person is rescued or able to leave, then that person is stranded. When the Americans are out of Afghanistan, they will no longer be stranded. But till then, they are.”
Another shorter response would be:
“Have you no shame?”
Or:
“How do you live with yourself?”
[NOTE: If you look at those responses I suggested in terms of the content/process distinction I’ve discussed on this blog, the first response is a content response and the next two are process responses.
Here’s the definition, in case you want a refresher:
Content is just what it sounds like: the subject matter about which two people (let’s say, a married couple) are arguing. “Did you do the dishes last night?” Process is everything else – for example, the emotion with which something is said, the type of vocabulary used, tone, repetition, body language, and the unspoken subtext.
When arguing, it’s good to be aware of the difference, and to be able to switch back and forth at times.]
You think Jen Psaki is bad? Wait until Symone Sanders has that job under President Harris.
Meanwhile, the “president” takes a knee during a photo op with the new WNBA champs: “The WNBA champions apparently do have time for losers. Even as thousands of Americans have been left stranded in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, the Seattle Storm came to the White House for a photo-op with Joe Biden to celebrate their victory. . . . But their return to the White House came with an awkward, cringeworthy moment, when Biden, during a photo-op, bizarrely kneeled [sic] in front of the team as he showed off a jersey that read “Biden 46.”
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/08/24/biden-takes-a-knee-during-photo-op-with-wnba-champions-n1472184
Priorities, dontcha know.
Fortunately it currently doesn’t seem as if most Americans are buying into Psaki’s interpretion of events. As to whether or not that matters much in the short term remains to be seen.
I’ve been trying to find some good news in all this. One possible bright side of all this is the stalling (and hopefully the eventual euthanization) of the absolutely insane mulit-trillion dollar “infrastructure” spending spree the Democrats and a few quisling Republicans were attempting to ram through.
Ahh, a bit of a break from the silence from my lib/D friends on FB. The new narrative is emerging: “They’ve got 60k people out in the last few days! They are doing a wonderful job!” (Somehow that the problem was of their making never comes up), Then the expected line: “Biden is cleaning up 2 messes left to him by Trump: Covid and Afghanistan”
These people, and the rest of half the country, are beyond redemption. Not even this CF is going to open their eyes.
They’ve got 60k people out in the last few days!
Pity that roughly 55k of those people are Afghanis. Don’t worry though. Jen Psaki says that they will all receive thorough background checks. That’s a neat trick for a great many Afghanis who don’t have a shred of documented background. Apparently, one ISIS person has already been caught and detained from a group of refugees.
On this score, Jen Psaki has been widely misunderstood. Strand is another word for shore. Afghanistan is landlocked. No sea, no shore. By definition, no one is stranded.
Strand is another word for yarn, which is what Psaki has spun.
I’d say 60k is an asspull. Then there is how many are Americans, how many aren’t, and how many are left there?
This doesn’t even get into the oddity that nobody talks about as in why is there a date to get civilian Americans out. Military I can understand a government wanting out and sort of understand a date certain, but civilians? This with the roadblocks making getting to the airport very difficult to impossible spells out that they want hostages.
I expect that those not getting out will be rounded up and labeled as spies or some such legal fiction.
Touche, tcrosse!
physicsguy:
Of course they’re not going to change their minds. They will seize with great relief on a way to escape their cognitive dissonance, and then they will reassure each other and reinforce it by repeating it to each other. They will rid themselves of any need for guilt or the need to examine what they have enabled, and will fall back on the old familiar and always-available “blame Trump and the GOP.”
The more interesting question is whether all of them will go that route, or whether some will have an awakening. And if the latter, what percentage? I have no doubt it would be low, but every bit counts.
It is a depressing thing to understand how sheepish even the supposedly intelligent (or otherwise-intelligent) can be and often are. But that’s been my observation over the years.
“On Monday, the Biden administration announced that it had ferried at least 37,000 people out of the increasingly inhumane conditions that prevail in Hamid Karzai International Airport”
[…]
“As of Monday, only about 3,300 of the estimated 10 to 15,000 Americans who were trapped in Afghanistan when Kabul fell have been ferried out of the country.”
https://www.commentary.org/noah-rothman/the-largest-hostage-crisis-in-american-history/
“The more interesting question is whether all of them will go that route, or whether some will have an awakening.”
Oh, there’s going to be an awakening. U.S. federal debt was at 100% or more of GDP for three straight years at the end of WWII (1945-1947). That was the high water mark for U.S. federal debut until it was at 100% or more of GDP the last EIGHT YEARS. And it was over 90% for the three years before that.
I’m no economist but I find it hard to believe that ratio of debt to GDP can be sustained much longer without SOME serious consequences, and I see little chance anything will be done before those consequences occur.
Mike
Neo, you made me think of this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhMEKiIb86I
I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a push to nominate Biden for the Nobel Peace Prize for his successful withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and the subsequent “heroic humanitarian airlift”.
Neo:
I was speaking about civilians having a date certain to leave Afghanistan. Tyrannies often prevent their own people from leaving but usually not civilian citizens of another nation unless they are charged with a crime, made up or not.
geoffb:
I know.
Somehow a comment of mine intended for a different person on a different thread got attached to your name and put in this thread. I’ll remove it now.
Jen Psaki has revealed herself to be not just a bald faced liar without shame but more importantly, an exemplar of the banality of evil.
OMG! I just want to wipe that smile off her face as she chastises him for his language! Her smile tells me that she thinks she is soooo much more clever than him and that has thought of the “perfect” answer. What a jerk.
I agree, I do want to ask her if she has no conscience, no sense of right or wrong? No sense of what is true or what isn’t? Does she really think she is that much smarter than the rest of us that we will buy that lie?
I do not believe the numbers the Admin is touting. Just another lie.
Neo:
Thank you. I thought it might be something like that.
I always know just what to say, too late.
Have said this before but the comparison of Psaki to McEnany is stark and unflattering to the former.
“… the comparison of Psaki to McEnany is stark and unflattering to the former.”
What?!
@neo:
The Taliban are no Beauty Queens, but I would have thought your Insect Overlords were not so new and resided mainly in DC, Alexandria / Fairfax County. Or are those the Lizard People? Sometimes I lose track.
Fully on board with Embrace Your Hatred as far as current Western Ruling Elites taken broadly are concerned. This because change cannot happen without some tectonic shifts in our culture’s Morality. Disgust and contempt have a a big place in self-policing. They exist always, but the arrow points at us right now. Needs to be turned around.
As for Taliban and others… Make more like a Lepidopterist.
Ray! Psaki is greatly and obviously the extreme inferior to Kayleigh McEnany, in every possible respect.
In 18 days, on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, when the Taliban parade dozens, hundreds? of shackled American citizens before the cameras to have a traditional Islamic victory celebration with a mass beheading… claiming that no Americans are stranded in Afghanistan will be impossible to sustain.
FOX could run a continual clip of Bidet’s and Psaki’s ‘assurances’ with a bit of flavoring by bit players like Blinkin, Austin, Kirby and Milley. Perhaps with Harris cackling in the background. Closing with American hostages being led to their grisly deaths…
No, that would force the FCC to revoke FOX’s broadcasting license. Something that’s probably in the works.
As they say in the biz, this story has ‘legs’… very long legs.
Politically, Bidet is a dead man walking.
No doubt Harris will do her best to exceed Bidet but predictably fail to meet that stygian standard, given that she sets a new metric in incompetence.
I wonder whether her VP will be Whitmer, Warren, Newsome, or… perhaps Sanders? Though handing the VP slot to mass murderers* Whitmer or Newsome might be a “non-starter”.
In embracing the radical left, the democrat party is digging its own grave. But very deep graves take time to dig.
*Cuomo had company, 7 other democrat governors.
Geoffrey Britain:
I don’t think they’ll do that, for one simple reason: they would like Joe Biden (or his ilk, but preferably Joe himself) to remain in power. They don’t want to undermine him too much. It’s a tightrope they need to walk: humiliate him, make him give them what they want, but don’t do anything so egregious that America will cough him up.
steve walsh:
Psaki is a far superior BS-er. You might say she’s got a gift.
The editors of Greece’s newspaper “of record”, a NYT subsidiary, were ecstatic that Jen Psaki, whose great grandfather emigrated from Greece was a key spokesperson for the Biden administration. They were head over heels in love with Joe Biden in full belief that he was the second coming of Obama. How times have changed in 8 short months.
A counterargument for the United States by Alex Papachelas:
“…I hear the counterargument. Which is what? That US President Joe That Biden did the system’s dirty work. He inherited a superpower which is retreating on various fronts, that was embroiled in an unwinnable war that cost many billions of dollars each year. He knew that his decision would carry a political cost. But there was no other way to handle a deadlock that was not of his own making. ”
https://www.ekathimerini.com/opinion/1166603/a-counterargument-for-the-united-states/
Laughable if it wasn’t so tragic. Completely off target in so many ways. I do believe that genuine worry is spreading among our (former) allies no matter how they are trying to sugarcoat the new reality.
“…irresponsible…”
Interesting word to use in this, um, context….
Alas, for True Jen (and the administration/party she so perfectly represents), anyone who might dare to point out the Truth is obviously irresponsible.
Which means that in addition to such stirring slogans as “Unity”, “Build Back Better” and “America is Back”, one could certainly add “Integrity”, “Honesty” and “Resolve”….
(“Unity”—by getting rid of any opposition; “Build Back Better”—by first destroying most everything; and “America is Back”—to thosee glorious Obama years.)
Coming up….: “Solvency”?
“Psaki is a far superior BS-er. You might say she’s got a gift.”
Ha, ok! I’ll give you (her) that, but no more!
neo,
I hope you’re right but I’m doubtful given that the Taliban’s reasoning rests upon different premises. I don’t think they care about political considerations because they’re now certain that America is a ‘weak horse’.
The jihadist mindset, like all totalitarians, views the weak as at best, deserving of humiliation and dominance. Allah and his perfect prophet Muhammad have declared in very specific terms how conquered infidels are to be treated.
1,400 years of ‘precedent’. Which states that any American left in Afghanistan whose value as a hostage is problematic, faces the ‘choice’ of conversion, enslavement or death.
The two shorter responses are useless, because they both appeal to the other person’s conscience. That strategy is ineffective if they have no conscience to appeal to.
If you dosed Jen Psaki with truth serum and asked her those two questions, this is how she would respond:
“Have you no shame?” “None at all.”
“How do you live with yourself?” “I also lack any sense of guilt, remorse, or responsibility. So I can lie all day long, and it doesn’t bother me even a little bit.”
Dr. Chaotica:
Of course. But that’s not the point of those questions. The point is not to appeal to the person to whom they are addressed. They are meant to appeal to the audience – to those who still DO have a sense of shame or at least the ability to recognize that Psaki has none. They are what is called rhetorical questions. They also have the function of getting outside of the back-and-forth with Psaki on nit-picking about the meaning of “stranded.” They cut to the chase, as it were.
Geoffrey Britain:
I am certainly not sure, either. It’s just a possibility.
America is now governed by a group of sociopaths. Which is IMO what Democrats are.
When have they been in the right? They were the slavers, the people who converted South Vietnam into communism, the FDR socialists, the Clinton excusers, the Obamaphiles, and now we have the Biden sociopaths, who lie while smiling or chastising, shutting down pipelines and fracking, spending trillions which cheapens the $ to cause serious inflation, and assigning thousands of Americans to effective imprisonment in Afghanistan.
How many of you know our CIA director, a former career diplomat aka bullsh*tter, flew to Kabul on Monday to meet a Taliban leader?
It is clear America is being destroyed. By Democrats. Intentionally.
The Union cannot stand. The South should secede. To H with the West Coast and New England: MA voted 78% for Biden.