RUTHFULLY YOURS

Who is the worst cabinet secretary in Joe Biden’s administration?

I know that the competition is stiff. Ponder, if your stomach can take it, secretary of state Antony Blinken, the stuffed shirt to end all stuffed shirts. Or secretary of defense Lloyd “Stand Down” Austin, the man who, with General Mark “White Rage” Milley, has transformed the US military into a racially obsessed reform school for budding transsexuals. Halloween is coming — and the Biden administration could field the entire team.

But for this quarter’s top prize must surely go to Alejandro Mayorkas, the man in charge of the Orwellian-named Department of Homeland Security.

A superb example of closing the barn doors after the horses had bolted, this superfluous and meddlesome agency was created after Osama bin Laden’s boys took out the World Trade Towers and incinerated part of the Pentagon. Too late! But that’s what bloated bureaucracies do. Something bad happens because you were’t paying attention, so spend a gazillion dollars to create more layers of bureaucracy that don’t do anything constructive but do inconvenience people every time they travel by plane and so remind them that the government is Doing Something to Stop Terrorism. Do you think that fielding a battalion of TSA agents to palpate Aunt Susan and irradiate every traveler in case he is carrying a bottle of water or wearing a belt with a metal buckle cuts down on hijackings or other acts of terror? Of course not. But it does suck up a lot of money, which after all is one of the main ends of government, and it also creates another layer of state coercion, which often seems to be the other main end.

Anyway, Mayorkas is the perfect bureaucrat for this new agency. He is totally on board with whatever narrative his masters are emitting this week, and he lies with aplomb. Just now he is attracting a lot of ink because it has been revealed that he lied when presented with some melodramatic pictures of border agents on horseback trying to corral some illegal migrants. The media screamed that the men on horseback were “whipping” the poor defenseless undocumented future welfare recipients. “Oh, my God, they are being mean to these unarmed potential Democratic voters!” The El Paso Times got the bulletin and reproduced it precisely: “The agent swung his whip menacingly, charging his horse toward the men in the river who were trying to return to an encampment under the international bridge in Del Rio after buying food and water in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico.” Ginning up his parrot imitation, Mayorkas repeated after Jen Psaki (remember her?) and said he found the pictures “horrifying.”

“Horrifying!”

The trouble was, however, there were no whips. What might have looked like whips to people innocent of the art of horseback riding were actually reins, items to control horses, not wayward aliens attempting to cross our southern border illegally. (See “Horse lesson for novices.”)

And here’s the cherry on top: Mayorkas knew that the media narrative was, if I may so put it, horseshit. This just out from Fox News’s Bill Melugin: “Mayorkas was alerted by DHS’s top public affairs official that the ‘whipping’ narrative behind horseback BP photos wasn’t true, but at a WH press conference 2.5 hours later, he didn’t refute that narrative, instead calling the images ‘horrifying.’”

Egg, meet face. But like any aspiring despot, Mayorkas doesn’t care. He has learned from the best and lies brazenly. His go-to lie, of course, is that the southern border is “closed.” He says that even as we watch real-time videos of illegal migrants streaming in their thousands across the border.

And let’s not forget that it was Mayorkas’s Department of Homeland Security that attempted to foist the “Disinformation Governance Board” on the American people last spring. That stupid, if menacing, idea was instantly met with some portion of the ridicule and contempt that it deserved. Florida governor Ron DeSantis summed up the response of many when he wondered whether that assault on free expression was a “belated April Fools’ joke.”

The outcry against Mayorkas’s effort to treat free expression as a threat to “homeland security” was so great that he had to drop it, at least temporarily, at least under that name. But his legacy of threatening mendacity lives on. Alejandro Mayorkas is clearly the winner of this week’s Best Lying Despot Contest.