Watching State Department Spokesman John Kirby spar with one of Washington’s last real journalists, AP diplomatic correspondent Matt Lee, is one of the best tickets in town. From his claims that “the entire international community” is demanding that Syria’s Assad step down — which earned a guffaw from Lee — to his claim that the Syrian people have the right to live any way they choose as long as Washington agrees with their choice, John Kirby is the epitome of the clueless Washington foreign policy establishment, subsumed into the propagandistic world of their own making until reality itself ceases to exist. He is the Baghdad Bob of the US State Department.
Surely a future addition to John Kirby’s State Department Greatest Hits will be today’s press briefing, where under questioning about the recent US boots-on-the-ground escalation in Syria Kirby claimed that “no boots on the ground” has never been the US administration’s position:
This time Kirby was not greeted only by the guffaws of an incredulous Matt Lee, but with protests and groans from the entire press corps. Poor Kirby.
He did not even need the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research to steer him away from such laughable claims. The Washington Post — hardly a bastion of non-interventionism and anti-Obamaism — published an article on October 15, 2015 with the following extremely large and clear headline: “8 times Obama said there would be no ground troops or no combat mission in Syria.” The article went on to detail — with links — the minimum of eight previous times President Obama made exactly such a claim.
Next up, Kirby furiously insists that we are at war with Eastasia: We have always been at war with Eastasia…
