Though This Be Madness, Yet There Is Method In 't

Has anyone else noticed that recently, every time John Kirby appears at a White House press conference, Karine Jean-Pierre stands at his shoulder? This appears to date from a kerfuffle last September, when according to the New York Post,

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby was left stunned Friday when a reporter asked if his frequent briefing room appearances meant that he was the “second press secretary” and undermining Karine Jean-Pierre, the first woman of color to be chief White House spokesperson.

The head-turning inquiry came from Cameroonian journalist Simon Ateba — who was selected by Jean-Pierre to ask Kirby a question, despite previously sparring with Kirby on a similar topic.

Note that according to the Post, the moment was scripted.

“The reason I’m asking is because almost everywhere I go, I have black people telling me that the reason you’re at the White House is to undermine the first female black [press] secretary,” added Ateba, of Today News Africa.

. . . “If anyone gets any kind of idea in their head that I’m taking away from Karine or her work that’s really regrettable,” Kirby responded to Ateba.

“And I’m very sorry that that’s any impression that anybody would have. I am simply working at the National Security Council on national security communications — and with her good graces, I’m able to come up here every now and then to talk to you about simply national security issues,” Kirby continued.

Kirby's response sounds as if it was pretty tightly scripted too, and almost immediately, we began to see a lot less of Adm Kirby (checking Wikipedia, his naval career and rise to rear admiral was entirely via positions as a public affairs officer, so I don't feel all that sorry for the guy -- he basically just looked good in an admiral's suit.)

In the photo above, where they let him out again on a very short leash to address the UFO ballons, he looks tired and unhappy. In the wake of revelations that the UFO balloons were student science projects and hobby exercises by middle-aged white guys, his job was to obscure that:

[T]he Biden administration is still assessing the three unknown objects, and White House National Security Council Director of Strategic Communications John Kirby said Friday they might never know what the objects were.

"I can’t sit here and promise you that we will get to that level of fidelity and detail," Kirby said, noting "a lot of it" would depend on when and how officials recover the objects.

Kirby said "it is going to be very difficult to find them" given the conditions of the locations where the objects were shot down, and said it would also be difficult to "do the forensics to identify" them.

"I can’t promise you that we’ll know definitively, one way or the other," Kirby said.

Well, that's because the balloons are about 36 inches in diameter, their payloads are nothing but small circuit boards, and the half-million dollar missiles that shot them down basically reduced everything to a little cloud of corn flakes, if that. Any effort at recovery was pure kabuki. The Mounties seem to have been the first to get real about this, likely because Biden can't order them to do anything more:

“After conducting an extensive search in the Lake Huron area with the assistance of the Canadian Coast Guard and other domestic and international partners, a decision was reached to suspend the search due to several factors including deteriorating weather and the low probability of recovery,” the RCMP said.

I had a boss once who, in response to some corporate ukase, came up to me with it and said, "Were you ever in the military? If you were, you know about bullsh*t. Well, this is bullsh*t." Somehow I think Adm Kirby's expression in the photo above reflects this, but again, he's made his own bed here. So he's going to say nothing to contradict the author of last Sunday's bullsh*t, presumably out of professional courtesy:

The U.S. Air Force general overseeing North American airspace said on Sunday after a series of shoot-downs of unidentified objects that he would not rule out aliens or any other explanation yet, deferring to U.S. intelligence experts.

Asked whether he had ruled out an extraterrestrial origin for three airborne objects shot down by U.S. warplanes in as many days, General Glen VanHerck said: "I'll let the intel community and the counterintelligence community figure that out. I haven't ruled out anything."

But they did feel the need to put Adm Kirby out for something.

Karine Jean-Pierre says the U.S. military shot an object over Canada "because it's part of NORAD. There's, uh, the NORAD is part of like a, part of a—it's a, it's a, what you call, a coalition, a consortium."

"We did it clearly in step with CANADIA." pic.twitter.com/X1CmWnR2ns

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 12, 2023

He wasn't out there to explain anything at all, he was just there to fill in time without the risk that Ms Jean-Pierre would embarrass herself yet further. I'm sure that's yet another factor in the admiral's facial expression.

Here's my current theory. Somehow in the general panicked muddle at the White House as members of Biden's own party criticized his non-response to the Chinese spy balloon, somebody brought up the hundreds of hobbyist pico balloons traversing the country at any given time. Whoever brought it up hadn't thought it through all that clearly, but may well have made the point that we don't shoot those down, do we? And Trump did nothing about those, either! He knew all about them and did nothing!

President Brandon seized on that point. Probably without understanding the underlying issue very well at all, he decided on a show of strength, not only was he going to shoot down the big Chinese ballon, he was going to take a hard line on all those little balloons that Trump did nothing about. I'll bet that everyone in the room, from the national security director on down, knew exactly what those little balloons were, and so did the F-22 and F-16 pilots who were ordered to shoot them down. (They could be court martialed for giving their real opinions.) For that matter, so did the Mounties tasked with making a token search for the debris, but at least they could quickly but politely bow out. Every last one of them knew it was bullsh*t.

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines spoke briefly on the suspected Chinese spy balloon controversy during an appearance at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. Haines, who oversees the U.S. intelligence community, remarked on how “crazy” the situation has become in the past couple weeks.

“It’s so crazy. It’s really like an episode of ‘Veep,’ you know, on some level,” she quipped, referring to the HBO political satire show that starred Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

It's crazy because nobody at that level has any credibility. And that's because some kids working on scout projects and middle-aged white guy hobbyists have made monkeys out of them without even meaning to.

I briefly thought someone like Secretary Austin could fix the problem by making a good-humored offer of reimbursement for the balloons, but that leaves out the question of who'll pay for the $2 million worth of rockets that shot them down. The problem is beyond simple remedy, because it was micromanaged by the guy at the top. But this, yet once more, is not the product of dementia. This is Hunter's dad and Jill's husband. However wacky, there's method in it.