OUCH! The press took National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby totally by surprise. The unprepared White House goon didn’t expect to be hit by a flurry of bipartisan outrage over Biden’s weak response to China’s treatment of its protesters.
China has forced its citizens back into lockdowns striving for this ‘zero-covid’ number but the people are sick of it. They want and need to continue on with their lives and provide for their families. In response, the Chinses people took to the streets in protest against the communist government.
The Associated Press’s Zeke Miller set the table with the first general China questions that triggered Kirby’s nonchalant response that “[t]he White House supports the right of peaceful protest.”
But it was CBS’s Ed O’Keefe who provided some bite standing up for the protests, which made sense seeing as how competitors ABC is owned by Disney (with business in China) and NBC having a correspondent still in China.
O’Keefe poked holes in this esoteric statement of support: “In that realm, the statement you issued — or that was issued earlier today didn’t include any explicit calls for China to stop detaining and harming protesters and journalists. Why not?”
Kirby didn’t go any further other than to add “we’re going to watch this closely, and we’ll see where things go.”
AFP’s Sebastian Smith brought up an important question as to whether this has received any additional priority from the President: “Could you give us a sense of how much the President is engaging with this issue? Is he watching it personally, you know, getting updated more than on, maybe, some other things?”
Kirby scoffed at that, insisting Biden’s “staying briefed on what’s going on inside China” before joking “I’ve never been in the room where he wasn’t, like, closely briefed.”
Coming from the left, Yahoo! News’s Alexander Nazaryan argued people “assume that the United States supports peaceful protest around the world” and such a take isn’t “a novel position.”
Given the stakes, Nazarayan wondered, why hasn’t the administration gone further “to…assert the rights of people, advocating for freedom and democracy more forcefully than perhaps we have.”
Kirby cowardly sought to not anger the communist thugs and replied the U.S. has reemphasized in this moment it’s ongoing belief in “free assembly and…peaceful protest” and that this is an issue “for the Chinese people and the Chinese government to speak to.”
It didn’t end with China. Fox News Peter Doocy also took this time to toss out concerns over Biden’s zero-domestic drilling using And asked Kirby why the administration has moved forward with drilling in Venezuela. Doocy questioned Biden’s phony climate change claim and asked Kirby how drilling in Venezuela was better for the planet.
Kirby responded, ” No, it has nothing to do with a benefit to the climate, Peter. Again, there are 9,000 unused permits here in the United States on federal land that oil and gas companies can and should take advantage of. Nine thousand and we’re talking about one there in Venezuela. Now, look, it remains to be seen how much will get drilled down there. It’ll be up to Chevron to decide that, Peter. But — but as a function of the sanction itself, that oil, whatever product is drilled, has to come to the United States.”