As Biden Left DC Amid Afghanistan Disaster, Psaki Takes a Week Off as Well
As chaos reigns in Afghanistan following the Taliban seizure of Kabul on Sunday and Americans are left stranded, scrambling to find a way out of the new caliphate state, President Joe Biden finds himself in the throes of the biggest disaster of his first term — so far, at least.
Biden is now left with his abysmally incorrect predictions about how much time the Kabul government could hold out ringing in the ears of the American public, and where has he been?
Hanging out at Camp David, monitoring the situation via video chat as his administration officials were left to cope with the massive foreign policy crisis without their commander-in-chief.
While news broke late Monday morning that Biden was planning to address the nation from the White House in the afternoon, as Axios reported, by then the damage had been done. As a foreign policy disaster unfolded during this presidency, Biden was away from the office.
On Sunday, after gaining considerable ground across Afghanistan over the last week, the Taliban descended on Kabul. Within a few hours, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had fled the country, and the militants were holding a news conference as they announced the soon-to-be-established Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
In the last hours before the terrorists descended on the capital, a staffer at the American embassy in Kabul removed the American flag, CNN reported.
Afghanistan had fallen.
Given that the president was not even in town, you’d think that this might be a great time for Biden’s press secretary to step up and do some serious damage control. Right?
Yes, it would be ideal for a president in the midst of such a horrific blunder to have a big-name personality out spinning the heck out of his every failed move … yet President Joe Biden’s top spokeswoman is nowhere to be found.
Fox News reported Sunday that White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki is on vacation this week, if you can believe that.
So the Biden administration is struggling to find a way to get the thousands of Americans still stuck in Afghanistan safely out (about 10,000, according to The New York Times). It has to work out a way to help the thousands of Afghans who helped with American efforts and supported the U.S.-backed government who are in danger of being executed by the Taliban, according to Human Rights Watch.
And Psaki’s not even around to help lie to the American public about how the administration has everything under control.
When Fox tried to email Psaki questions at her official White House email account about the chaos in Kabul, it received a friendly autoreply informing the sender that she would be “out of the office from August 15th-August 22nd.”
The Washington Examiner’s Becket Adams also tried to reach out to Psaki via email and received the same reply.
Meanwhile, Biden’s Monday afternoon address might be necessary, but it’s also too late.
By then, the whole world will have seen the Taliban — a Third World Islamist insurgency — doing a better job with media transparency than the Biden administration, having happily held a news conference to celebrate the Kabul takeover while the leader of the free world and his proxies were incommunicado.
And the best the White House has to offer us in the way of updates on how President Biden is handling the crisis?
This photo:
This morning, the President and Vice President met with their national security team and senior officials to hear updates on the draw down of our civilian personnel in Afghanistan, evacuations of SIV applicants and other Afghan allies, and the ongoing security situation in Kabul. pic.twitter.com/U7IpK3Hyj8
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 15, 2021
The Biden administration has loudly signaled surprise that the Taliban managed to so quickly topple the last semblances of stable leadership in the country as the U.S. and NATO forces were managing their withdrawal.
Yet as Adams noted, Psaki’s last working day would have been Friday, when the Taliban had already captured 142 of Afghanistan’s 407 districts and was already engaged in fights to seize 170 more.
I’m about as far removed from an official of the federal government as you can get, a complete and total layperson when it comes to complex matters of foreign affairs, and even I could have told you Friday afternoon there was a good chance the Taliban fighters were about to take Kabul.
So are we expected to believe that Jen Psaki couldn’t have postponed her vacation as this conspicuous crisis involving the lives of thousands of Americans and Afghans loyal to our cause broke out?
I guess she’ll just have to circle back to us next week when she gets back to the office.
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