I don't usually link to Saturday Night Live sketches from the previous night because I figure (a) if you care about them, you've seen them and (b) most of them aren't that great. And yes, I know (b) means I'm agreeing with Donald J. Trump and that alone makes my opinion highly suspect. But this one with Melissa McCarthy — of all possible castings — as White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer struck me as particularly on-target.
In a way, I feel sorry for Mr. Spicer…though not too sorry since he had to know what the job involved when he accepted it. It involves going out in a nice suit and tie, standing before the nation's cameras and then dodging and spinning what are usually pretty fair questions. All press secretaries have to do some of that but it's got to be super-hard to do in service of the current White House occupant.
If Trump is saying 2+2 equals 19, Spicer has to stand at his podium and insist that, yes, 2+2 is inarguably 19 and only a biased, unprofessional press would even suggest otherwise. He doesn't have the power to say, "Yeah, it's four. I don't know where he got that." If he did, he'd be fired within the hour and Trump would tweet bad things about him.
In the past, we had some White House Press Secretaries who had a little more wiggle room to concede distortions and to walk back falsehoods. Gerald Ford's first press secretary even resigned after Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. They kept sending terHorst out to deny such a thing was under consideration and then when Ford did it, terHorst felt he'd been sent out to lie too many times and got out. Usually though, those guys have the task of defending the indefensible. Spicer is more graceless than most but that's kind of the theme of this administration. Here's the sketch…