The Republican Party this month has released a series of ads slamming President Joe Biden over the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, the current state of the American economy, and the Biden border crisis.
In an ad released last week, the GOP highlight Biden’s repeated claims that there would not need to be emergency evacuations of Americans and that he felt Afghanistan could hold against the Taliban. Of course, the Taliban took over with a matter of hours of Biden’s clumsy withdrawal.
The thorough ad also underscores the president’s absence from Washington at the time of the crisis, including vacationing in Delaware and apparently being teleconferenced at Camp David. Notably, Biden has avoided questions from reporters after his widely-panned press briefings.
After a Monday presser, Biden was asked by a reporter, “Do you know how many Americans are left in Afghanistan?” The president hightailed it out of the room without even acknowledging the question. Similarly, following a Tuesday press conference, POTUS refused to take any questions from reporters.
Last week, Biden could not be bothered with questions from the media on the disastrous situation in Afghanistan, as reportedly thousands of Americans remain stranded.
Soon after Biden’s address last week, the president’s ABC News interview with Democrat ally George Stephanopoulos was widely panned as incoherent, if not dishonest.
Moreover, Fox News reported last Monday that White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was “out of the office” for the week as the crisis worsened:
Fox News sent questions to Psaki’s White House email address Sunday morning and received an auto-reply. Hours later, on Sunday evening, Fox News attempted once again to reach the White House spokeswoman. The same auto-reply, stating that the voice of the White House would not be available for the next week, was sent.
“I will be out of the office from August 15th-August 22nd,” the message said. Reporters were directed to reach out to other press officers, instead.
Americans last week were offered a Pentagon press briefing that gave few answers, former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said: “And still, she said, Press Secretary John Kirby couldn’t answer some of the most pressing questions. When asked how many American citizens were trapped in Afghanistan, Kirby admitted, ‘I don’t know.’”
“And I don’t know how many Americans are in Afghanistan,” Kirby said last Wednesday. “That’s a question put to the State Department, not the Department of Defense. We don’t have that kind of granularity.” The secretary offered his “best guess” of somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 Americans near Kabul.
According to an Axios report this week, Republicans have rolled out numerous ads over the Afghanistan disaster. “The haphazard U.S. withdrawal is the first major policy vulnerability presented by the Biden administration,” the report said. “The opposition expects it to play heavily in 2022 messaging — and even in the 2024 presidential contest.”
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Related: McEnany Rips Psaki For Hiding ‘When The Going Gets Tough’