White House: No, ISIS Still Can’t Have A F**king Varsity Jacket!

Since June, a who’s-who of White House correspondents has undertaken a valiant campaign to get ISIS (or ISIL, or the Islamic State, or  ) promoted from “Junior Varsity squad,” beginning with Fox News’ Ed Henry, then ABC News’ Jon Karl. CNN’s Jim Acosta, CNN’s Michelle Kosinski, and then Karl again. All referenced President Obama’s quote during a January interview with The New Yorker in which Obama told David Remnick that “if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” and all wanted to know if the President pooed the screwch with that comment. Those attempts have met with limited success.

At Monday’s White House daily briefing, that effort continued. First, it was NBC News’ Peter Alexander, who followed a series of questions about the ISIS threat by asking, “Did the President underestimate ISIS when he referred to them in an interview only a couple of months ago as a JV squad, in making a reference to National Basketball Association teams like the Lakers?”

With a smile, Earnest replied, “Well, I thought somebody might ask this question today, so I wanted to pull the transcript of the interview, because it’s important to understand the context in which this was delivered.”

Quoting that interview, Earnest said, “I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland, versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.”

“So the President was not singling out ISIL,” Earnest explained. “He was talking about the very different threat that is posed by a range of extremists around the globe. Many of them do not have designs on attacking the West or on attacking the United States, and that is what puts them in stark contrast to the goals and capability of the previously existing al Qaeda core network that was led by Osama bin Laden.”

Having made that distinction, Earnest then rattled off a list of the United States’ accomplishments in degrading al Qaeda, including the killing of Osama bin Laden and the transformation of the organization’s line of succession into a gin rummy game in the break room of a Starbucks.

All of this inane fascination with that quote has managed to illustrate the importance of…READ MORE

By: Tommy Christopher

Tommy Christopher is The Daily Banter's White House Correspondent and Political Analyst. He's been a political reporter and liberal commentator since 2007, and has covered the White House since the beginning of the Obama administration, first for PoliticsDaily, and then for Mediaite. Christopher is a frequent guest on a variety of television, radio, and online programs, and was the villain in the documentaries The Audacity of Democracy and Hating Breitbart. He's also That Guy Who Live-Tweeted His Own Heart Attack, and the only person to have ever received public apologies from both Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.