Great Question, Awful Comparison | Winners & Losers in Today’s Green Room

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki and Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich tangled Wednesday afternoon over whether the White House is “blaming” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for inflation.

Inflation is at 40-year high record levels, as anyone who makes purchases well knows. President Joe Biden – who is the president – and his administration have previously argued that the pandemic, American buying habits, Republicans, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are culpable. In fact, the president has recently taken to calling it “Putin’s Price Hike.”

Elsewhere in the briefing Fox Business reporter Edward Lawrence asked Psaki if President Biden “acknowledges any responsibility” for inflation, and Psaki brought up several of those factors in her answer.

In a blistering statement earlier in the week, Psaki added the Texas governor to that list, blasting him for additional truck inspections at the border and connecting them to inflation and supply chain issues. Heinrich turned to that statement in her own inflation question.

“You had mentioned in that statement that the truck inspections have led — that Governor Abbott has been conducting — have led to disruptions for the food and automobile supply chains and rising prices for families,” she asked. “So is the White House blaming Greg Abbott for inflation?”

Psaki’s answer went into detail on the reasons behind the statement, saying, “I think we’re trying to state the facts of what his — another political stunt that we’re seeing happen and the impact of it.”

The comprehensive answer demonstrates how effective that question was. The job of the press corps is to do exactly what Heinrich did. She asked a probing question in a direct way and got a specific answer on an issue that affects every American.

That’s how this all works.

Blogger, political commentator, and CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis drew a tremendous wave of public mockery and criticism when he said that Twitter today, in the wake of Elon Musk‘s massive purchase offer, feels like being in Germany on the cusp of Hitler’s regime.

Jarvis was among the many, many, many users who reacted to and commented on Musk’s bid to buy out Twitter completely. Musk has been a vocal critic of Twitter, and in his filing with the SEC laid into management, as detailed in our A -Block below..

Many libertarian, center right, and right wing pundits have high expectations that Musk will reform Twitter’s sometimes capricious moderation policies, which they say is a huge enhancement and protection of free speech.

Among Democrats, the left, and the media, Musk’s move to take over Twitter is being treated as not just unwelcome, but hostile to the very concepts of Democracy, as hyperbolically stated by the Washington Post‘s Max Boot.

But it was the journalism professor’s dramatic Weimar tweet that really stirred up a hornet’s nest..

“Today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany,” he wrote.

Contra the Boot backlash, Jarvis’s detractors crossed party lines. Voluminously.

The professor then tried to clap back at the claps back, to limited success.

Nazi comparisons are de rigeur of late in politics. Although, usually they aren’t trotted out for the apprehension that someone might reduce speech strictures.

However poetically one attempts to couch their Godwin’s Law proof, it’s rarely well received. That’s another truism, whether you’re a professor of journalism, a Kennedy, or even Elon Musk.