Psaki: Buttigieg is a ‘Role Model’ For Doing What No One Knew He Was Doing

My latest in PJ Media:

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.

Trump’s 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.

There is more. Read the rest here.