Newsmax Riddles Jen Psaki About ‘Secret Memo’ She Responds By Throwing Stellar Shade

Journalism hit yet another low today and I’m sure we haven’t seen the bottom yet, or anywhere near it, as long as Jen Psaki is taking questions from the likes of Newsmax in the White House briefing room. “Reporter” John Gizzi asked about a “secret [infrastructure] memo” circulating on Capitol Hill, “somebody went through it or is claiming to have gone through it” and bottom line the figures ad up to a trillion more dollars than what the Biden administration has put on the table so far. Sigh. That translates as, “I’m going to waste your time asking a question based on rumor and hearsay and attempt to raise simple arithmetic to crisis proportions, because I’m desperately trying to create a talking point.”

John Gizzi is John Gizzi-ing during the White House press briefing pic.twitter.com/PSG25TDFF9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 5, 2021

So….. “People are saying the numbers that are right there in the plan and can only add up to one total, are mysteriously totaling up to something else.” What is this witchcraft?!

— markggarcia (@markggarcia) April 5, 2021

This is the prelude to a QAnon exchange, about secret memos and secret figures, written in Roman numerals, probably. Go over to Mother Jones for an analysis of the actual bill and not a lot of hooey. Talk about going from the ridiculous to the sublime.

Yes, the $2 trillion proposal President Joe Biden is unveiling Wednesday would fix roads, transit stations, and bridges. But to simply call it an infrastructure plan understates its ambitions. It’s the closest we’ve come to a realization of the Green New Deal, an ambitious collection of progressive proposals to combat climate change, racial injustice, and gender inequality as much as one to upgrade asphalt.

The president’s plan doesn’t quite meet the challenge of addressing the climate crisis, but it would go a long way toward tackling some of the United States’ biggest and stubborn sources of pollution, by expanding clean energy for the electricity, building, and transportation sectors. To begin to understand the scope: At $1 trillion in total clean energy investment, the plan’s climate spending is more than Congress’ entire investment in the 2009 stimulus, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Other proposals single out persistent racial inequities and propose funding to remedy them, including money to clean up the many kinds of pollution that plague communities of color across the country. It also seeks to advance gender equity, with a $400 billion investment in long-term care for the elderly and disabled that aims to pay the women who do that work fairly and alleviate the burdens of caregiving that often fall on women in families.

The plan is still in its broad strokes, and the final version could look quite different from Biden’s original vision in the narrowly Democratic-controlled Congress. Given those political realities, the White House’s ambition to “reimagine and rebuild a new American economy” is more of a down payment on the environmental, racial justice, and gender inequality challenges Biden promised to tackle on the campaign trail than it is a fulfillment of those pledges. But that down payment is, nonetheless, a significant one: Those political constraints also mean the infrastructure package might be the president’s only chance to make good on these key issues.

Look for upcoming tutorials on how infrastructure works and more asinine conspiracy theory questions levelled at the Biden administration to gin up outrage and paranoia among the right-wing. The only way to get one or both chambers of Congress back is to freak out the electorate.