The progressive meltdown over the collapse of the Schumer Shutdown continues apace. This postcard from the edge of despair comes to us from MSNBC/M-SNOW*, where Jen Circle-Back Psaki discovers disillusionment the most absurd way possible.
Psaki apparently spent her entire career in Washington DC believing Chuck Schumer. Either that, or she’s adopting the role of the naïf to cover for her own refusal to explain politics to her audience for the last six weeks. Last night, she fed into the progressive narrrative that Schumer’s flop was somehow a great surprise, considering how “fiery” Schumer had been at the start of the shutdown.
Really? “It’s literally life and death,” Schumer declared in a video that couldn’t be described as “fiery” even if it burst into flames on your screen. It’s standard Schumer demagoguery, especially since the only potential risk to life and death was the shutdown itself, as air travelers are now discovering. Yet Psaki, who’s supposedly on M-SNOW because of her political experience and acumen, feigned shock, shock at political gambling in the Capitol Hill casino:
“I mean, that guy was fiery. There was ominous music, he swore, I mean, there was a lot in that video. What happened to that guy? And of course, Democrats had every reason to feel like they were in a good position to keep up the fight, I mean, for a range of reasons. Polling just last week from NBC News found that voters blame Trump and Republicans for the shutdown over Democrats by a 10-point margin. And that was before Democrats absolutely cleaned the clocks of Republicans all across the country last Tuesday, signaling that voters were behind their efforts to stand up to this administration. But after all that, after the party unity and the favorable polling and the massive election wins, the lesson that eight members of the Senate Democratic Caucus that we know of took away was apparently this:”
Psaki then added a coda to her performative cluelessness:
ANGUS KING: “So standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work. It actually gave him more power.”
[Clip ends]PSAKI: “Um, no, that’s not the lesson. Agree to disagree there, I guess, Senator King.”
Ahem. If Psaki is this unschooled in politics, maybe she should pass the baton to someone who’s less easily duped. Is this her first government shutdown? Did she not see how every shutdown ended prior to this one — with the collapse of the shutdown as the White House applied pressure to their opposition party? King is absolutely correct. Shutdowns hand power to the president, who can make their opposition pay for the stunt in all sorts of different ways, a lesson that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama taught Republicans well. Not only was this outcome predictable, it was widely predicted all along. All that Donald Trump needed to do was find the right pressure points and watch Democrats retreat.
I don’t buy for a second that Psaki believes this, however. She has to act betrayed, or else she would have to explain to the M-SNOW audience why she and other hosts didn’t point out the political reality all along. To do that would be to admit that progressives bullied Schumer into a feckless strategy that had no chance of success, strictly for the TikTok clicks and the donations. Psaki didn’t just arrive from a 5000-watt station in Dubuque, after all; she spent years in the Obama administration and Biden Regency. That Schumer video wasn’t “fiery” at all — it was a hostage video.
Her shock, shock at the failure of the worst tactical and strategic move in American politics wins Psaki the Captain Louis Renault Award, and the remaining viewers of M-SNOW the Flounder Participation Trophy (NSFW for language). In fact, the latter could very well work as M-SNOW’s new corporate motto.
* – Note: A reader referred to MSNOW as M-SNOW after yesterday’s post about hiring black actors to highlight the channel’s lily-white presenters. I believe it’s a more descriptive name than whatever MSNOW is supposed to suggest.
Editor’s Note: After more than 40 days of screwing Americans, a few Dems have finally caved. The Schumer Shutdown was never about principle—just inflicting pain for political points. They own this.
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