Like The Golden Mountain, Jen Psaki's Brother Does Not Exist

I've long been intrigued by the implications of the statement "the golden mountain does not exist". What it does is construct a credible assertion and then, just like that, say it isn't there. But I think it's also a first cousin to the remark that if someone hadn't existed, it would have been necessary to invent him. There are strange imputational byways in both cases.

At the height of last week's GameStop controversy, somehow a rumor spread that White House press secretary Jen Psaki had a brother who was a portfolio manager for Citadel, a Wall Street firm involved in bailing out the short sale. A columnist at Red State decided to look this up.

[B]ased on all available familial information I can find about Jen Psaki, she has no brother, much less one named Jeff or Jeffrey. She only has two sisters.

. . . Here’s also a local Greenwich take (she’s from Connecticut) when she left the White House under Obama. “Psaki is the eldest of three daughters of Jim Psaki, of Greenwich, and Eileen Medvey, of Stamford.” It also mentions only her two sisters, just like the obit. No brother.

No brother? OK, fine. But it sounds like, for the sake of some sort of narrative, it was at least briefly necessary to invent him. Why? Clearly there are Aristotelians out there looking for causes and at least venturing hypotheses. This particular hypothesis was tested and found wanting, but the question continues why a White House press secretary should instinctively seem to favor bailouts for the rich.

Actually, I think Greenwich is a clue -- her parents hail from Greenwich and nearby Stamford, according to the above account.

Greenwich in particular is noted for gated communities "Greenwich’s confidential communities feature world-class amenities such as private beaches and docks, polo grounds and elite clubs."

We don't know if Psaki's specific background includes this -- a quick web search gives its median income as $97,616, as opposed to Bethesda at $85,244, so it's definitely up there -- but it's not hard to conclude that she comes from a privileged, indeed entitled, background. No brother at Citadel needed -- but we could just as well invent him.

A second Red State columnist asserts

Jen Psaki is an objectively bad press secretary. It’s not because she’s a partisan, as all press secretaries are partisans. Rather, it’s because she’s constantly unprepared, can’t answer basic questions, and relies on the media lauding her for always needing to “circle back.”

Another commentator, Mark Dice, predicts she won't be in her job much longer. I'm less sure. It seems to me that if you need an up-to-the-second poster child for "incompetent", you could do worse than Psaki. But that says you shouldn't rule her out. The great conundrum of incompetence is its brute-force staying power. The Psalms cover this sort of thing, after all.

Incompetents are both a caucus and a very large constituency. When Gerald Weinberg spoke of the majority of IT staff who do little more than refer problems to the one or two competent people in their department, he was speaking, witttingly or not, of the incompetents. Psaki's permanently affectless expression speaks volumes. Her fellow drones in the press corps will be pulling for her.

When I worked in cubicle hell, the general perception was that the incompetent bosses were there because someone always wanted them there. It's only dire circumstance, maybe once in a couple of generations, that forces change -- in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the US armed forces were forced to institute "plucking boards" to identify and remove incompetent senior officers, because it was forced on them by exigency. But neither 9/11 nor the 2008 housing bubble forced anything like that on the finincial and political establishment

The bad news is that Psaki's there because influential people want her there. The potential good news is it's because they're incompetent, too.