President Joe Biden’s administration faces crises of its own making at the southern border, at the nation’s ports, in Afghanistan, with inflation, and in public health.
That’s a lot. Making them worse is the tendency (amounting to an instinct) of top officials to disappear at the first sign of trouble and blame other people. As the battle is joined (literally, not just metaphorically, in Afghanistan), they do not march to the sound of the guns but scuttle away. They are utterly unsuited to the jobs they occupy.
As we’ve noted, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg went missing while a national shipping crisis developed. It is perhaps a commentary on the standard uselessness of the Department of Transportation that nobody even noticed.
In a sense, Buttigieg represents Biden’s administration as a whole. He took a sabbatical to bond with his newly adopted son. This is, in isolation, perhaps a good thing. But it is lamentable, ridiculous, and reprehensible to continue his domestic seclusion when a crisis explodes in his area of responsibility. He is a Cabinet secretary, for goodness’s sake, and should be working flat-out, not going AWOL while America’s supply chain breaks.
It would be unfair to pick on Buttigieg alone, for, as noted, his dereliction of duty is characteristic of the nonentities who make up the Biden administration.
In Xavier Becerra, Biden chose someone with no public health experience to run the nation’s health bureaucracy. Becerra took over in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic and predictably made no visible contribution to the government’s COVID-19 response. What he does with his days is anyone’s guess, for he is an invisible figure.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, the former Federal Reserve chairwoman, has stood idly by as inflation has spiraled upward to its highest level in 13 years. If it ever concerned her when it was specifically her job to keep inflation under control, it certainly seems not to bother her now. For she speaks out in support of Biden’s demand for yet another $5.5 trillion in needless welfare spending. Inflation is outpacing wage growth, so unless you get a 6% raise in your pay, your income is falling.
And then there is the border crisis. One cannot accuse Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas of disappearing, for he rivals even Sen. Chuck Schumer in his eagerness and ability to get in front of TV cameras. But once he is there, Mayorkas passes the buck, claiming that former President Donald Trump is the reason illegal immigrants rushed the border in record numbers right after Biden took office and encouraged mass northern migration.
Then, Mayorkas blamed Congress for Biden’s wholly unnecessary decision to release tens of thousands of (often COVID-infected) illegal immigrants into the United States, even though Trump managed to avoid this problem. And he tries to blame the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for his use of Title 42 to deny some migrants entry and to ship others back to Mexico or to their countries of origin.
Finally, we arrive at Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who continues to bleat about the Taliban’s lack of woke inclusiveness. It is embarrassing to hear him. Of course these jihadists were not going to treat women properly after American forces departed in shambles, leaving billions of dollars of military equipment behind. If Blinken had been more concerned in July about the Taliban being the Taliban, maybe our nation’s chaotic and lethal retreat from reality could have been avoided.
The appeal of Biden’s candidacy in 2020 (to those who found it appealing) was that he would return America to normality. He was supposedly going to restore competence and common sense to the government. But he has brought neither. Instead, he has staffed his administration with incompetents who leave a vacuum where authority should be. And into that vacuum rush far-left ideologues who now dictate policy without opposition from the supposed centrist in charge. No wonder independents who believed he’d be better than Trump are abandoning this new government in droves.
