A Tale of Two Women....

 

   I am still feeling amazed that I have such a profound sense of relief....as in RELIEF....that the Idiot is out of the oval office.  Yes, he's still in the news because he's not dead or banished to Tralfamador...the fictional planet in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s short story collection, "Welcome to the Monkey House". But, he's not getting anything like the saturation coverage that he's had for the last five years.  And, that is huge.

  And, there is another face that I am pleased to not see. the smarmy, heavily made-up, often sneering visage of the former press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany.  She is attractive, in a sorority sister/ cheerleader kind of way.  But, I feel slightly nauseated at the sight of her.  She came to her job already having a background at Fox News, where she was employed as an assistant to Mike Hukabee....now there's a nasty, pseudo-Christian piece of work for you.

She said on day one: "I will not lie to you."
And, then she lied almost daily for a year.

   So, from the very first day that she took over the podium in the press room at the White House, Kayleigh had an attitude.  She oozes arrogance. It's there in her voice, in her manners...or lack thereof...and it seems evident that she's pretty sure she's the smartest person in the room.  Sadly, Harvard Law School can count her among its graduates and, as is so often the case, when a person has been imbued with the Harvard Law patina, it leaves them feeling like this.  At some point--likely far down the road--Kayleigh may come to the startling revelation that just because you have an elite CV, does NOT mean you are a good human being. In order to get to that place, you need to have actual compassion on board, and I seriously doubt that is on the law curriculum at any of the elite Ivies. Being a 'smart' person, will get you on the NYC subway, however..........as long as you have a MetroCard or can do that scanning thing with your phone. 

   None of that matters, however.  What is so annoying about this woman is her archetypal conservative  political philosophy ('sucks to be you', from Ayn Rand) and her continuous inference that anybody who is not on the same conservative page must be somehow ignorant or merely inferior.  She is, of course, a true-believer, i.e. a KoolAid, and has spouted the Idiot's lies with apparent determination to shove them down our unwilling throats.  Arrogance is often a form of over-compensation for feelings of inadequacy.  But, in this time of people like Marjorie Taylor-Green and Lauren Bobert, along with Madison Cawthorn...and, there's a list....it has become a banner that some people think furthers their conservative cause.  News Flash! It does not.  Actually, it just makes you look stupid because anybody who goes around acting in an arrogant manner rarely, if ever, has the goods to back it up.  Arrogance is like the hood ornament on some old barn clunker.  It may allude to the glory days of Packard, Pontiac or Plymouth, but there are just mice nests under the hood. 

 So, yes, it has been refreshing and a great relief to not see Kayleigh standing at her podium spewing lies from the Idiot.  But, I didn't really comprehend how far out to lunch Kayleigh was until I saw Jen Psaki brief the press for the first time.

Suddenly, facts and science matter again.

    Suddenly, I was watching a person I immediately knew I could believe.  She is a model of clarity, intelligence and respect.  She is not only at least as intellectually astute as McEnany, she has the kind of intelligence that gives her the ability to see a situation and then address it without making the reporter who asked the question feel that they were out of line for so doing.  She does her research, is very invested in transparency and, I know I am speaking for millions of Americans when I say that she makes you feel like facts matter again, and that science still has a critical role in making the big decisions about our future on this planet.

  Jen Psaki is a breath of fresh air.  After four plus years of being lied to by the Idiot's various press secretaries....beginning with Sean Spicer standing up there and telling us that we should not believe our eyes and that the Idiot had the biggest inauguration crowd....anywhere, ever.  It comes as a vast sense of comfort to have a spokesperson whom I know, intuitively, I can trust.  When a politician, an operative, or a pundit feeds you 'alternative facts', and you know they lie whenever it suits their agenda...all trust quickly evaporates and it becomes impossible to feel okay, much less 'good' about your own government.

  And, that is how we got into so much trouble with a chasm of distrust and even hatred in a now deeply divided society that formerly prided itself on 'values'.