Now that it has been revealed that Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has not been on the job since August and Old Joe Biden’s handlers apparently didn’t think the growing supply chain crisis was important enough to warrant getting someone else actually to do Pete’s job, the Democrat elites are circling the wagons. Rep. Katherine Clark (D-She/Her), the newly minted “Assistant Speaker of the House,” tweeted Friday: “Going on paternity leave isn’t being ‘MIA.’ It’s called being a parent. And @SecretaryPete is a new parent no different than the millions of other Americans who also deserve the right to care for their loved ones during birth, sickness and old age.” Biden’s chief excuse-maker Jen Psaki retweeted this and doubled down in her own comment: “Also proud to work in an Administration that is fighting to make paid leave a reality for everyone, and with people like @SecretaryPete who are role models on the importance of paid leave for new parents.” You might not have thought this administration could reach a new level of duplicity, but here we are.
Sure, going on paternity leave isn’t being MIA, if your employer knows you’re going and the tasks for which you’re responsible are being handled by someone else. Buttigieg’s employer is not Old Joe or his handlers; he works for the American people, who only discovered that he was on leave after he had been gone for weeks. That points up the absurdity of Psaki’s comment: How could Papa Pete be a role model for anyone for doing something that no one knew he was doing? As Stephen Green put it, Jen Psaki is either the stupidest person in the world, or hopes you are.
Former Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller enunciated the obvious rejoinder to Psaki: “If the goal was to have @SecretaryPete serve as a ‘role model’ why was this kept a secret and why wasn’t an Acting Secretary appointed during his leave? Under what theory of gov’t can an entire Dept have no one running it during a grave crisis for which that Dept is responsible?”
Buttigieg defended himself by saying that he was actually at work, just not at his job. “The big thing is having a newly personal appreciation for the fact that this is work. It may be time away from a professional role, but it’s very much time on.” That’s great for Pete, but the fact remains that millions of fathers and mothers have had to balance the responsibilities of work and parenthood, and didn’t have the luxury of the taxpayer base of a large industrialized nation paying their salaries while they took two months off from work to learn how to bottle-feed a baby.
That is, two months and counting. A Transportation Department spokesman said Thursday that Buttigieg will “continue to take some time over the coming weeks to support his husband and take care of his new children.” Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) chimed in to defend this as well: “It is important for him to set the standard for other folks and make it acceptable. It’s just as important for fathers to be there as mothers to be there.” There is no mother there, but that is not something Duckworth or Pete’s other defenders will be inclined to discuss, much less to consider as anything negative. “Birthing persons” have completed their job in this scenario, and are no longer needed.
Related: Buttigieg Pressed by Fox News Anchor Over Supply Chain Chaos
Meanwhile, this cushy paid vacation that Buttigieg is enjoying courtesy of American taxpayers, as well as the tweets from Clark and Psaki, demonstrate how far out of touch the political elites are today from the concerns and difficulties of ordinary Americans. Buttigieg’s long unnoticed absence epitomizes Biden’s entire presidency. Here we have a man pretending to be secretary of Transportation taking time off to pretend to be a mother, while his boss pretends to be president and the press secretary pretends that this secret arrangement offers the rest of us a marvelous role model.
Ultimately, Psaki’s words are ominous. How, exactly, is Pete Buttigieg a role model, in the cloud of clichés, deceptions, excuses and lies that fill her mind? He is a role model because he is getting a long paid vacation. What America needs, in the eyes of Biden’s handlers, is more paid paternity leave, for longer periods. It’s all wonderfully compassionate, but someone has to pay for it all, and that’s the working Americans who are set to be as burdened by this administration as they are despised by its leading figures. Pete, in other words, is a role model because to enable more people to do what he did will require more socialism in the United States. In other words, more robbing of the workers to pay for those who don’t work. Watch for it.
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