The White House has called a lid before noon.

We do not expect to see or hear from President Biden for the rest of the day.

— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) October 9, 2023

As of the 3 PM ET threshold, that lid remains locked tight. In fact, three days into the crisis, Biden has not even issued a statement regarding the lost American lives and unknown number of hostages:

Timely to note that the President himself has not yet commented – or even released a statement – on the 9 Americans confirmed dead in Israel. https://t.co/Ss6iuwCdcA

— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) October 9, 2023

One might think that this duck-and-cover from Biden has to do with his political vulnerability over his recent $6 billion hostage deal with Iran. One would be wrong, however. As Jim Geraghty reminds us today at NRO’s The Corner, Biden usually disappears for days on end in a crisis, especially those of his own making. He took four days to re-emerge into public view after his disgraceful retreat out of Afghanistan and abandonment of 14,000 Americans in August 2021, for instance.

Even when Biden does occasionally appear, it’s usually to gaslight on the results of his absentee leadership. He spent months trying to claim that inflation was (a) not real, (b) a result of economic growth, (c) the product of corporate greed, plus a number of other excuses or denial strategies. He fumbles his way through remarks, dodges serious questions, and occasionally rants about the dangers of his political opponents while ignoring the real dangers presented by our enemies, particularly Iran and China.

Joe Biden is a gutless, disgraceful, and incompetent demagogue, even apart from the apparent physical and cognitive infirmities he displays. His choice as running mate and VP, Kamala Harris, isn’t even competent enough for her current office, let alone qualified to be a heartbeat away from becoming the Leader of the Free World. They are both fundamentally unserious people who have been placed in the most serious roles possible.

Case in point, as I was writing this post …

Terrorists have slaughtered at least nine Americans and are holding more hostage while threatening to execute them on live TV. Maybe the White House needs to focus, huh? https://t.co/MEq7wCvOW4

— Ed Morrissey (@EdMorrissey) October 9, 2023

The “Junk Fee Prevention Act”? That’s what the White House wants us to discuss?

But if we’re honest with ourselves — if we are really really honest — we would acknowledge that Biden and Harris are symptoms rather than causes of a national fundamental unseriousness. Biden’s presidency came about because Democrats have become too radical to find and support serious people in leadership that focus on serious issues rather than “equity.” Harris was the worst candidate in that cycle, and yet Democrats pressed Biden to choose her not because of her qualifications but because it made them look good.

If we’re still being honest … Republicans haven’t done much better in terms of seriousness, not for a while. The Republicans in charge of the one lever of power in Washington they control just decapitated their leadership over process complaints. The people who committed this decapitation got egged on by voters more eager to stick a thumb in the eye of anything “establishment” than in dealing with the limited options available while Democrats control the Senate and White House.

Presidential politics on this side of the aisle has been almost as unserious. Rather than deal with the issues of the present and the near future, most of  the debate still centers on the 2020 election and the grievances of the party’s former president. At least some of those grievances are legitimate, too, but they are beside the point when it comes to deciding on a future leader for serious times. Instead, the GOP’s voters are aiming to tie themselves to a candidate only eligible for a single term and encumbered by all sorts of legal problems, at least some of which are the result of electoral game-playing and baiting by their opponents.

That’s fundamentally unserious, too.

Now that the evil regime in Iran has unveiled its latest attempt to seize hegemony in the Middle East and demonstrate just how dangerous this world has become, it presents a challenge to voters across the spectrum. We have incentivized “owning the libs/cons” over serious policy considerations in part because we want to make politics into an entertainment, and in part because politicians failed to seriously address serious issues in the past. Lashing out may even have been a rational response to that failure, at least in the short run, but the crisis in the Middle East has to awaken us to the fact that the time for frivolous exercises in petty revenge is now over.

We need to get back to governing, not with demagogues who can only rally their base but with candidates with proven records of success in serious accomplishment. We cannot afford another four years of “owning the libs/cons” politics and the transformation of public policy into a vehicle for “burn it all down.” We need a national reset to a politics of building rather than tearing down, and a rethink of all previous assumptions on the structure of federal government.

We cannot do that without real, honest, serious debate and commitment to shared needs and necessities rather than personal vendettas and ego stroking. We have already lost too much time on those pursuits.

Oh, and by the by, Biden finally got around to addressing the deaths of eleven Americans as I finished this post. It came at 4:22 PM ET, almost three days into the crisis — and without showing up in person to read it aloud. Any bets on who actually wrote this while Biden sleeps?

🚨POTUS statement is out:

“Sadly, we now know that at least 11 American citizens were among those killed—many of whom made a second home in Israel.” pic.twitter.com/r5tLiLxxCs

— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) October 9, 2023