USING OUR WORDS: The slender blonde who's smarter than Us!

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2017

Part 3—McEnany's wins: We were amused, and not amused, by what we found when we googled Kayleigh McEnany again.

Who is Kayleigh McEnany? On a few occasions in the past year, we've tried to find out.

The basics are fairly simple. As explained in The New Yorker last fall, McEnany "is a twenty-eight-year-old Harvard Law School graduate who interned in the second Bush Administration and has supported Donald Trump since the primaries."

More specifically, McEnany has supported Trump on CNN, where she became a leading figure in the channel's million-member stable of "Trump explainers."

Primarily as a way to pretend that it was covering the White House campaign, CNN produced endless pundit discussions over the past two years. These cast-of-thousands pundit discussions would match reliable Trump supporters with reliable Trump detractors.

McEnany, 28, was one of the Trump supporters. We were amused, and not amused, by something we noticed yesterday when we googled her again.

Please understand. McEnany isn't just 28 and a Harvard law graduate. She's slender and blond and she comes from Tampa. In TV programming terms, she rates as conventionally attractive. This guaranteed that many liberal and mainstream halfwits would believe she was constantly being bested by CNN's stable of anti-Trump hacks.

Google provides many headlines testifying to McEnany's alleged defeats. We clicked on a headline from The Daily Beast, only to find a youngish male scribe snarking about this youngest of all "the Trumpkins:"

KIRELL (2/23/16): Similarly, cable news upstart Kayleigh McEnany has become a go-to for CNN on all things Trump. Easily the youngest of the Trumpkins, McEnany, 27, got her start as a Bush White House intern and eventually graduated to the hallowed halls of Fox News, working on Mike Huckabee’s show before seeking her own on-air career (which, at one point, included an audition for The View).

Trump’s candidacy has given the Harvard Law student an opening to appear frequently on the high-profile cable channels. Initially skeptical of the candidate (she told CNN in July that Trump ought to “tone it down” lest he become “another Todd Akin”—oh, how times change), McEnany now routinely shows up on CNN billed as a “Trump supporter.”

Really, it’s no surprise such a committed self-aggrandizer has attracted so many fans of the spotlight. If anything, he’s the king of fearless media hounds.

Hiss! Hiss-spit! Meee-ow! But that's the way our team tends to play. The truth is, we aren't hugely bright.

We decided to check the fuller text of what McEnany said that night. Below, we'll link you to the tape of what she actually said.

We decided to check because we've spent the past year watching liberal pundits lose debates to this "youngest Trumpkin." Let's fill in a bit more of her background:

McEnany hails from Tampa. As noted, she's youngish, slender and blonde. In that sense, she's cable-ready.

Did we mention the fact that she's also a recent Harvard Law School grad? Here's the slightly peculiar route she took to CNN:

Despite the fact the she's from Tampa, McEnany got her undergraduate degree from Georgetown, where she majored in foreign service. She then spent a year studying at Oxford, where she was likely recruited by Putin, a bit like the young Bill Clinton, who ran off to Moscow before her.

From Oxford, McEnany returned to Florida. She enrolled in the University of Miami Law School, where she seems to have been in the top one percent of her class.

To us, the story gets peculiarsome with her transfer to Harvard Law School. We'd never heard of law school transfers at all, let alone to Harvard Law, which is second only to the undergraduate Wharton School as the most selective institution in the history of the known world, including the whole solar system.

At any rate, McEany took that route—and ended up on CNN as one of its most frequently-used Trump explainers. She spent the past year winning debates with our team, or at least breaking even, although Google headlines suggest that we're the only ones over here in Our Tribe who were able to see this occur.

The truth is, we liberals frequently make it easy for The Others, in part because of the unimpressive ways we use our words. Tomorrow, for an example, we'll look at the ridiculous paraphrase uncorked by Nicholas Kristof today in his latest New York Times column.

Did Giuliani really say what Kristof says he said? Please. But then, our leaders are often highly unskilled when they use, or perhaps when they fail to use, their many and varied words.

Alas! When our teammates play it that way, they make it easy for a player like McEnany, who may be slender and blond but who is also extremely bright and very quick on her feet.

We pseudo-liberals! Again and again and again and again, our lack of skill at using our words is matched by our silly self-confidence. Year after year, for many decades, we've told ourselves that We Liberals are exceptionally bright, while Those People Over There are just extremely dumb.

The evidence suggest that many of Us have come to believe this twaddle! We use our words with little skill, engineering defeat as we do, and yet we manage to remain convinced that we've won every debate.

Might we cite one hypothetical example? When we casually say that Person X has "lied," we make the world extremely easy for people as bright as McEnany. Our silliest boys will then stand in line to insist that the slender thin blonde didn't win the (pointless) debate. But people as sharp as McEnany eat such boys for lunch.

Does it matter when we pleasure ourselves by dropping our various bombs? When we scatter our R-bombs around the land? When we casually but pleasingly say Person X has "lied?"

Yes, it actually matters! When we play our childish games, skillful figures like McEnany may eat us for a quick brunch.

Dumbly, without so much as knowing, we will have initiated a second discussion, a debate about how we can know that Donald J. Trump has "lied." This second discussion leads us away from whatever crazy, unhinged thing Donald J. Trump has just said.

We find ourselves in an ancillary discussion, a debate about how we know that he "lied." We'll dumbly believe that we won that debate, but no one else in TV land will see it the way We do.

We pseudos! Through our unskilled overstatements, we constantly trigger debates which we aren't likely to win. These childish errors are of course completely unforced.

If we knew how to use our words, we'd realize that you can devastate a crackpot like Trump without moving beyond the claims you can clearly defend and define. Because we aren't as smart as the people we mock, we don't understand such basic points. And, after the dust has settled, we aren't even able to see that we just got beaten about the head and ears.

By the way, what did McEnany actually say about Donald J. Trump that night? The silly child at The Beast made it sound like McEnany wasn't defending Trump at that juncture, when he stood in second place in the GOP primary race.

"Oh, how times change," our enabler said. One thing that hasn't changed in the past thirty years is the world-class haplessness of the scribes who pleasure us in such ways.

What did McEnany say that night about Candidate Donald J. Trump? Because we're liberals, the chances are good that we won't be able to discern that The Beast's account was off track.

That said, she did defend Trump that night; she did so with skill and aplomb. You can watch the tape right here. It runs just over six minutes; the link was right there at The Beast.

Nothing "changed" in McEnany's approach after that night. The Beast was just playing us, for the ten millionth time, when it served us the type of snark we love.

According to the scripts we love, McEnany just had to be fake, a shape-shifting "fan of the spotlight." In fact, she didn't shift her shape at all. McEnany, a Harvard Law grad, performed with great skill for two years.

We liberals! We reveled in bullroar of that type all through Campaign 2016. After decades of napping in the woods, we woke up to see that Trump won!

We started marching the very next day. Through decades of failures by "leadership," our trucks arrived late at the blaze.

Tomorrow: Concerning the role of The Interests and Power. Also, the power of all our words

Next week: Crafting our own defeat