Liz Peek:Biden’s inept Cabinet shares blame for Biden’s many failures Cabinet of Yellen, Buttigieg, Mayorkas partly responsible for White House incompetence
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-failure-cabinet-yellen-mayorkas-buttigieg
Folks, it’s not all Joe Biden’s fault that our nation is in trouble.
His utterly inept cabinet is also to blame.
Let’s start with Janet Yellen.
Yellen, the first female treasury secretary, appeared to be the most seasoned, the best credentialed and least political of all Biden’s cabinet appointees. Not so.
The treasury secretary recently confessed that she blew it on inflation. She didn’t apologize or admit its real cause, but at least she admitted she goofed.
She said, “I think I was wrong then about the path inflation would take … there have been unanticipated and large shocks to the economy … that I didn’t at the time fully understand.”
Yellen’s pitch is, essentially, that inflation blew in because of completely unpredictable events that no one could have anticipated. Untrue. Most economists agree that the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan spilled too much money into the recovering economy at the same time that we had goods shortages, sparking rising prices.
In fact, a new book out says Yellen agreed with Larry Summers, who warned that Biden’s spending spree would have just that effect, and argued for a smaller American Rescue Plan. Though she denies that account, it rings true. In other words, she knew better. Far from being the intellectual anchor of this administration, Yellen turns out to be yet another shill for Democrats’ left-wing policies.
Next up: Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas, the first Latino in that role, who has permitted the worst-ever assault on our southern border, failed to deliver a plan to confront the crisis and who lied to Congress when he claimed our “border is secure.”
On Mayorkas’ watch, 1.2 million people have been apprehended trying to enter the U.S. illegally in the past seven months, of which nearly half a million were from countries other than Mexico or the northern triangle of Ecuador, Guatemala and El Salvador. The vast majority of those people are single adults – not families fleeing poverty, and the total includes 40 men on the terror watch list.
Under Mayorkas, deaths due to drug overdoses topped 100,000 for the first time ever, the vast majority (71,000) from fentanyl, imported from China and Mexico across our southern border.
Mayorkas whined to a censorious Congress last year that he worked “18 hours a day.” When Republicans take back control of the House this fall, they should impeach him and let him catch up on his beauty sleep.
Next up: Pete Buttigieg, the first gay secretary of Transportation, who has been Biden’s invisible point guy responsible for smoothing our supply chains. As his reward for disappearing during our clogged-ports crisis (he took a months-long parental leave last summer after adopting twins with his husband), he is now in charge of $660 billion of the White House’s infrastructure program, which he can dispense around the country in politically helpful ways.
A recent interview with New York Magazine opens with Pete scoffing: “I don’t think it’s an accident that the last time fascism was fashionable in certain corners of this country’s political class, one of the things they said for Mussolini is he made the trains run on time — it was a transportation example…”
So, efficiency is a step toward fascism? Good news for Buttigieg: he has yet to take that first step.
As to what he has accomplished, even a fawning reporter who describes Buttigieg as “on everyone’s shortlist of possible presidential contenders” seems to struggle. Pete defends the White House’s performance saying, “We’re doing a lot.”
Then there’s Jennifer Granholm, second woman to serve as energy secretary, whose credentials for the job appear to be that she has swallowed Biden’s climate agenda hook, line and sinker, and especially his affection for electric vehicles. It certainly wasn’t her deep understanding of U.S. energy markets.
Early on, as she announced a planned withdrawal of oil from our Strategic Energy Reserve, a reporter asked the obvious question: how much oil does the U.S. consume? Astonishingly, she had no idea.
She also apparently knows nothing about U.S. oil production or how world energy markets work. Last fall, shifting the blame for rising oil prices, she claimed that “OPEC controls more than 50% of the petroleum supply.” That was not true then, or now. The EIA, which Granholm oversees, reports that OPEC supplied at the time less than 35% of global oil output. Moreover, the U.S. is the world’s biggest producer of oil.
Granholm’s official bio page echoes the Left’s claim that “There is no greater challenge facing our nation and our planet than the climate crisis,” even as Russian President Vladimir Putin obliterates a European country, China threatens its neighbors and COVID-19 kills millions.
Granholm’s grandiose green plans were doubtless a hit in the faculty lounge at University of California, Berkeley, where she taught; that’s where they, and she, belong.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin testifies before a House committee on Capitol Hill, May 11, 2022. (AP/Jose Luis Magana)
We must not neglect Attorney General Merrick Garland, who thinks that parents protesting the woke indoctrination of their children constitute a domestic terror threat
Or our first black Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who deserves special mention for his oversight of one of the most catastrophic military events in our nation’s history – the horrifically mismanaged pull-out from Afghanistan. That chaotic event resulted in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members and scores of Afghans and left our enemies with $7 billion in war materiel.
And we can’t resist calling out Deb Haaland, first Native American interior secretary and another climate zealot, who should be recognized for having blocked new oil and gas leasing in the midst of an energy crisis … even in defiance of a judge’s order. Quite simply, she is making matters worse.
Space does not permit acknowledging all of Biden’s C-team. We conclude by noting that on the White House website it says: “President Biden’s Cabinet reflects his pledge to appoint leaders of government agencies that reflect the country they aim to serve.”
Sorry, but I think our country is better than that.
Comments are closed.
