Kaleigh McEnany is a word warrior
You may have seen the clip elsewhere already, because it’s all around the right side of the blogosphere. But here are the closing moments from new WH press secretary Kaleigh McEnany’s press conference yesterday:
“Prepared” doesn’t even begin to describe it. And she’s beautiful, composed, and sharp as she uses a jujutsu move to attack the reporters and the networks by using their own words against them. Note how nearly as soon as the question begins, she is already looking at her notes to quickly locate the correct passage, and is ready before he’s even finished asking the question.
You know those films where the heroine suddenly flips a couple of men around because she’s so strong, even though it’s obvious it’s a fiction because the actress playing said heroine couldn’t do any such thing in real life? A lot of recent action films adore that scenario. But this is its equivalent in the cerebral action film known as the political news world. It’s a passage that’s incredibly satisfying to watch, and it’s not fiction.
[NOTE: McEnany is 32 years old, and was an early Trump supporter. She’s married to Sean Gilmartin, who’s a major league pitcher for the Tampa Bay Rays, and they have a baby only about six months old. Busy lady. Somehow I get the feeling she gets by on about three hours of sleep, although she doesn’t look it.]
Spicer. Huckabee-Sanders. Now McEnany.
Some of POTUS’ best choices.
What is so GD tiring is the continuous chain of “gotcha” questions by the press. At least she was ready and threw it right back at them. Don’t feed the trolls.
A very good choice indeed, but Trump has, unfortunately, made many poor appointments (Gary Cohn, Scaramucci, Omarosa, Mick Mulvaney, as well as the worthless swamp-creature currently running the FBI, C Wray); at least William Barr at DOJ seems to have been an excellent decision.
I like the reporter yelling out ‘you were prepared for that’ as she left as if that is a bad thing when it just shows how predictable these reporters are.
A very good choice indeed, but Trump has, unfortunately, made many bad decisions in personnel (Gary Cohn, Scaramucci, Omarosa, Mick Mulvaney, as well as the worthless swamp-creature currently running the FBI, C Wray)
What president hasn’t made some bad personnel choices? As for Wray, the sense at the time was that he was the best who could get past confirmation, which isn’t saying much.
With hindsight I’d suggest his worst pick was Sessions, but that was because Sessions misled him, concealing the fact that he was going to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.
A few ‘reporters’ should have left with tucked tails after that hilarious smack down. McEnany is new to me, glad to she is more than up to the task of turning the table on those scalliwags.
Griffin said,
“I like the reporter yelling out ‘you were prepared for that’ as she left as if that is a bad thing when it just shows how predictable these reporters are.”
I felt myself grinning when she opened up the notebook at her side as the question was being ask. Smart and prepared. Good for her.
That “gotcha” smile was wonderfully wiped off the vile puss of Jeff Mason.
Well done McEnany !
When I saw the clip my first thoughts were that McEnany presents as a petite and diminuative “valley girl.” When she began to speak I thought that her voice lacked the gravitas of a Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a Margaret Thatcher or even a Judy Scheindlin. By the time she finished my thoughts were: “I bet this woman has been seriously underestimated her entire life. I bet she counts on it.”
“Good on her” as they say.
Preparation, journalists unprepared for:
Her list of “what abouts” has been circulating around the conservative blogs for ages, but I suspect they don’t do any kind of basic research, which includes looking at what is being said by any media to the right of the Wall Street Journal (I would have said NYT, but WSJ is still a player for the left with money & business).
Also, they still don’t get Zito’s distinction between seriously and literally: Trump was clearly making a hyperbolic statement, along the lines of “Daddy won’t let the monsters get you” rather than a categorical statement.
Besides which, he tried not to let the coronavirus come to the States, but the Chinese, WHO, Democrats and press fought him at every step.
I watched the whole press conference. For the first time in my life, I’m going to recommend that others do so. Kaleigh McEnany was impressive throughout.
If you watch the whole thing, you get to see her build up momentum to that final question. For me, it felt like a cathartic scene from a movie. Her husband’s a baseball player, so maybe he’d call it a walk-off home run.
Being “prepared”, eh!?
Why…that…cheating,…conniving,…low-down Trumpette! The nerve! How did she ever think she’d get away with THAT!?
Anyways, she seems to have sorely riled several of those oh-so-virtuous folks who have worked indefatigably over the past several years to make dishonesty a veritable art form.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/view-kayleigh-mcenany-lie
So she’s gotten off to an excellent start. May she have many more successes!
T:
Legally Blonde.
She’s a Harvard Law graduate, among other things. And although that doesn’t necessarily mean a whole lot, in her case she survived there even though she’s a conservative. She must have been a fascinating presence there.
j e:
I’ve been running my own business for thirty years. You never know for sure that the person you hired will work out. But a secret of successful managers is knowing when to fire someone. Trump’s pretty good at that, no?
And as to Kayleigh McEnany:
Given my bucolic background, I’ve come to realize that it can be a big advantage to be underrated by your opponents. There persists among some puffed-up little men the notion that good-looking women, especially if they’re blonde, aren’t too bright. It was great to see Ms McEnany knock it out of the park. It’s been delicious to see my wife do the same thing. In a courtroom.
“There persists among some puffed-up little men the notion that good-looking women, especially if they’re blonde, aren’t too bright.” – Cap’nRusty
A lovely, very smart, young woman our kids went to high school with came home from her first year of college with a different hair color and insisting we now use her middle name. When I asked her why, she replied, “I discovered that a brunette named Elizabeth got a lot more respect than a blonde named Stacey.”
Welcome to the new century, same as the old one.
Said it elsewhere; looking like a cute sorority girl is a trap. Worked, too. Think those morons will learn?
It was delightful to see.
My sole concern is this: Only conservatives and a few libertarians saw it. And only conservatives and a few libertarians see the thousands of other news items which powerfully illustrate the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the left-of-center Powers That Be (whether they’re news media, or state governors, or bad-actors at FBI/Justice, or tenured-radicals, or diversity-office directors at major companies).
We’re all keenly aware of the horrifying stupidity, irrationality, venality, hypocrisy, and totalitarian impulses of that crowd, because not a day goes by without our information-sources offering us a half-dozen real-world examples.
But I worry that we, through the political diversification of our information-sources, are living in a different thought-world than the rest of America; that the majority of the electorate are “watching a different movie” (to use Scott Adams’ term for it).
Imagine what you’d think of the last six months in American politics if your input consisted of a daily diet of random snark from left-leaning celebrities and “influencers” (carefully scrubbed of conservative replies), 15 minutes’ coverage from ABC and 20 minutes coverage from CNN, overheard casually once every 2-3 days, along with color commentary from either NPR or the DJs at a local R&B station, heard between segments/songs during your commute. And maybe, if you’re the kind of person who’s particularly proud of keeping yourself well-informed, you also read the big-name newspaper of your nearest metropolis.
Doesn’t most of America (including, admittedly, a lot of non-voters) think…
(a.) Donald Trump lies stupidly, brazenly, and transparently all the time, leaving his interlocutors (who don’t lie) breathlessly aghast;
(b.) There’s irrefutable accumulated evidence that Trump has racist and authoritarian inclinations (and no reasonable arguments to the contrary);
(c.) The news media delivers a the kind of sober-minded normal-person interpretation of events that sober-minded normal people can usually trust;
(d.) Trump voters are mostly overweight dimwits reflexively mumbling jingoistic slogans, a bunch of stereotypical Wal-Mart shoppers whom any sensible person would be ashamed to identify with;
(e.) Trump’s decisions during the pandemic outbreak have certainly resulted in more deaths than otherwise would have occurred; and
(f.) Trump did something vaguely sketchy in collusion with the Russians during the last election and the Russians clearly want him to win the next one.
Isn’t that pretty much the majority view, even now? Don’t half your coworkers and half your neighbors think most or all of those things?
In a world where everyone’s news-inputs were (*cough*) “Fair and Balanced,” this next election ought to be a cakewalk for Trump.
But isn’t that exactly what our world isn’t?
R.C.:
Agreed, and I very much share your concern.That’s why I write so often about the MSM. It spews out the propaganda that helps to create the perceptions of way too many people.
“There persists among some puffed-up little men the notion that good-looking women, especially if they’re blonde, aren’t too bright.”
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Was it Len Deighton who had a character say that the best thing a spy could do was act dumb, and make it stick?
Sonny’s comment reminded me of a line in a review of one of our college plays, in which the reviewer said that the actor playing a rather obtuse character was “convincingly dull-witted” (the actor was, in fact, a 4.0 engineering student at a tough school).