I can't think of a presidential press secretary remotely as embarrassing as Karine Jean-Pierre.  Her inability to deal with questions for which she has no prepared answer makes me squirm with empathy over her embarrassment.  Watching her frantically scroll through her briefing book, looking for a rescue, something to read in response to an unanticipated topic, generates sympathy that lasts only until she mouths some inane and yet self-righteous response with a smug look on her face.

The role of a presidential press secretary inherently requires visibility, personifying the administration being represented.  I can only assume that some of Joe Biden's puppet masters decided a that a black, lesbian, immigrant press secretary was the perfect diversity hire, signaling their commitment to advancing those groups through appointment to roles for which they may be dubiously at best qualified.

Matt Margolis at PJ Media has assembled a series of tweets from RNC Research documenting the fact that KJP regularly mispronounces words that are familiar to the vast majority of adults and even most junior high school students.

“Bicarmel”pic.twitter.com/DCVrEggUv2

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 4, 2023

Karine Jean-Pierre refers to Russia's Nord Stream pipeline as the "Nordstrom" pipeline pic.twitter.com/G4tus1PuVJ

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 6, 2022

Acknowledging that it may seem petty to harp on mispronunciation, Margolis goes deeper amd writes:

It's bad enough she constantly needs to refer to notes, but her habitual mispronunciations suggest that she really doesn't know what she's talking about and is just brainlessly reading off her script.

I would add that she's not just reading from a script; she's reading it for the first time.  If she had practiced her answers in front of the people who wrote them out for her, she would have discovered that she doesn't know what "emeritus" means, much less how it is pronounced.  She's not just a figurehead puppet reading what others have written for her (just like the president she represents); she is a lazy figurehead who doesn't even do the bare minimum and go over her text before going in front of the cameras and reporters.

This is incompetence of a high order, compounded by sloth.