The New Jersey Drones

I keep thinking there's got to be a great New Jersey joke out there with a punchline involving drones, but I just haven't found it yet. Maybe Gutfeld will tell it when he comes back from wherever he is. (Full disclosure: I grew up in New Jersey until I was 15, when my family moved to Bethesda, of all places. I guarantee you, there are no Bethesda jokes. Nobody would dare.)

The fact that the only people seeing these drones are in New Jersey, though, keeps me from taking these reports as seriously as I otherwise might, but on the other hand, there's John Kirby pooh-poohing the whole thing from the White House:

"Using very sophisticated electronic detection technologies provided by federal authorities, we have not been able to, and neither have state or local law enforcement authorities, corroborate any of the reported visual sightings," he said. "To the contrary, upon review of available imagery, it appears that many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft that are being operated lawfully. The United States Coast Guard is providing support to the state of New Jersey, and has confirmed that there is no evidence of any foreign-based involvement from coastal vessels. And importantly, there are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted airspace."

This is the same John Kirby who told us on July 9, following Joe Biden's well-publicized gaffes in Europe and Hollywood the previous month and his disastrous June 27 debate,

“The president that I see every day, including yesterday a couple of times in the Oval Office, is robust. He’s lucid, he’s clear, he’s direct, and he’s in command of the context and information,” Kirby said on CNN’s News Central. “I mean, he was asking me questions yesterday about events in Europe that I simply didn‘t have the answers for, and I had to go back and come back to him with some answers. That‘s the president that I see every day. That‘s the commander in chief that I‘ve been serving the last two-and-a-half years.”

Two weeks later, Nancy Pelosi rendered that whole story inoperative. This man has no credibility. Anything he tells us with certainty is probably a lie. David Freiheit, who posts on the Viva Frei YouTube channel, has a theory that probably best explains this.

At 3:24, he says,

They know damn well what it is, amd it's not that they're not telling us because they're scared [of looking stupid], they don't give a flying F if they look stupid. They lie, and they're proud to lie, it's part of the game, it's part of the deceit, and they have no problem "looking stupid" if the purpose of that "looking stupid" is ultimately to conceal what they are up to.

This is the puzzle I have over John Kirby. Right now, he's 61 years old. He'll be leaving the White House next month. His public profile as someone with no credibility probably isn't quite high enough to make him a punchline in a Gutfeld monologue, but consider as well that he allowed himself to be held back in the press office so he wouldn't outshine Karine Jean-Pierre, which brands him a beta male. He's got some sort of pension from the Navy, but I don't think he's going to have a post-White House career even equivalent to Jen Psaki.

Maybe he can get some sort of job as a low-ranking PR flack with a defense contractor that owes him a favor, but the whole point of hiring someone like that is to have a high-profile guy with credibility, so maybe someone will hire him, but not for a whole lot of money.

Compare that to James Kallstrom, who retired from the FBI at age 54 not long after he served as the crisis management spokesperson for the TWA Fligfht 800 investigation, as well as managing it internally. He was probably the one figure who restored the FBI's reputation following the Waco and Ruby Ridge scandals in the early 1990s, but after he left, the agency continueed its decline. According to Wikipedia,

Kallstrom left government work for private sector employment in the financial industry beginning in 1998. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, he returned to the public sector to lead New York state's public safety office at the request of George Pataki.

Of course -- who better for a task like that? And it made Pataki look good, too.

Kallstrom was the host of the Discovery Channel show The FBI Files until it was cancelled in 2006. . . . He was also critical of the Special Counsel investigation by Robert Mueller, saying in 2018 that it was orchestrated by a cabal beyond the scope of the FBI and the intelligence community. He added that he "did not recognize the agency I gave 28 years of my life to".

He waas able to capitalize on a reputation for integrity for the rest of his career, and he had to go as far as separating himself from the FBI's reputation to keep his own. This won't be John Kirby.

Actually, I'm going to be grateful that along with Kamala, Dougie, Joe, Dr Jill, and Karine Jean-Pierre, Kirby will be among those we won't have to hear from after another month or so. But will the drone sightings go on that long?

For now, this is actually a crisis, at least sort of one. As David Freiheit points out, while they look stupid, they don't care if they look stupid, because they can shove the gaslight narrative down your throat. It reminds me of what the IBM rep told me and others at a meeting of users from different companies who used an IBM product and were dissatisfied with it:

Remember this. We don't sell to you, we sell to your bosses. You may not like our product, but your bosses don't care, and they will shove it down your throats.

I was already rooting for IBM's competitors, who actually weren't any better, they just sold to a different group of bosses, and they're out of the picture now, too. But that attitude doesn't last. I'm just waiting for a good new New Jersey joke with drones in it.