By this point, it’s become pretty clear that the White House staff is limiting and scripting the opportunities for President Joe Biden to answer direct questions from the press. The reasons should be obvious. If Uncle Joe starts freestyling with his answers you never know which track that train is going to go blasting down. Yet that appears to be what happened when Biden took a break from signing his mountains of executive orders to sneak in a round of golf back home in Delaware on Saturday. The press corps dutifully tagged along and managed to get the President to answer a couple of questions after the round was over. To their credit, one reporter tagged him with a question on his recent flip-flop on the refugee cap. That’s when the gaffe-prone Biden managed to deliver three separate shots to the carefully scripted talking points his team has been holding together for weeks, particularly when it comes to the “situation” at the border. Let’s see if you can spot them. (NY Post)
President Biden is finally calling the chaos at the southern border what it is — a crisis.
The startling rhetorical turnabout came Saturday in an off-the-cuff conversation with reporters in Wilmington, Del., as Biden tried to defend his Friday flip-flop on refugee admissions.
“We’re going to increase the number [of refugees allowed into the country],” Biden said as he headed home after playing the first golf game of his presidency. “The problem was that the refugee part was working on the crisis that ended up on the border with young people.”
“We couldn’t do two things at once,” he added. “But now we are going to increase the number.”
Perhaps it was inevitable. Sooner or later, Biden was going to be caught in an unguarded moment and refer to the border crisis as a crisis on the border. I’ve no doubt that Jen Psaki will be practicing all sorts of new dance moves to navigate her way out of this one and explain to us what Joe Biden really meant. (Which, of course, will have nothing to do with a crisis. And if it does, it will be Donald Trump’s fault.)
But the fun didn’t stop there. In the very next sentence, the Truth Fairy got hold of Uncle Joe’s tongue yet again. He actually stood in front of a microphone and delivered the sentence, “We couldn’t do two things at once.” Even if that’s completely true (and it probably is), that’s not how you say it. The leader of the free world is running a team that “can’t do two things at once.” Headlines about walking and chewing gum are sure to follow. Sadly, it’s not at all unreasonable to believe that the actual migrant crisis at the border is sucking up so many resources that they really don’t have the bandwidth to process a larger number of legitimate refugees at this point. But there were surely far better ways to say it.
Finally, Joe Biden appears to have once again thrown Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas under the bus. The President isn’t taking personal responsibility for the fallout following his executive orders and warm, welcoming statements to migrants. And even though he put Kamala Harris in charge of this situation, she can’t be allowed to be seen as being in charge of a crisis. So it falls on the shoulders of DHS. And they don’t have any extra resources to apply to the situation or the authority to roll back any of Biden’s mandates. It’s a rough time to be Mayorkas.
Place your bets, folks. I’m guessing that Joe Biden won’t be getting any more golf outings in the near future. And probably not any other casual affairs where he’s suddenly left in the midst of a group of reporters, either.
