Pollak: When Democrats Say ‘I Take Responsibility,’ They Mean the Opposite

Joe Biden leaves (Anna Moneymaker / Getty)
Anna Moneymaker / Getty

President Joe Biden is winning praise from the left for supposedly taking responsibility for the disastrous way the U.S. left Afghanistan.

Biden did say: “I am President of the United States of America, and the buck stops with me.” But he went on to blame the deal he “inherited” from President Donald Trump; the Afghan leaders who, he said, “gave up and fled the country”; and the Afghan military, which he said had “collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight.”

So he passed the buck.

Then he turned around and went back to Camp David, where he was scheduled to be on vacation until Wednesday. That’s how President Joe Biden “took responsibility” for Afghanistan. Biden’s empty words are a familiar tactic used by other Democrats to deflect criticism during a crisis.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for example, “took responsibility” for that administration’s failure to protect the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.

What did that mean? Absolutely nothing. No one in the Obama administration was ever fired over Benghazi; four State Department officials were simply reassigned. And Clinton was defiant when questioned by Congress about the cover-up.

Likewise, Hillary Clinton said she took “responsibility” for her email scandal, in which she kept government emails on an unsecured private server whose contents were deleted. But she never came clean, and Obama’s DOJ let her off the hook.

That is how Biden “took responsibility” on Monday: he said “the buck stops here,” and even claimed things were going according to plan, then went back to Camp David while thousands of Americans remained stranded in Kabul and in danger.

Back in February, Biden told CBS News that he did not, in fact, have responsibility for what happened in Afghanistan: “Do I bear responsibility? Zero responsibility.”

That is how Biden felt when he could have made a real plan. When it mattered.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Note: Weingarten appeared to be referring to Trump’s refusal to take responsibility for a coronavirus testing debacle that was not, in fact, his fault. Perhaps he could have taken responsibility anyway, but even Dr. Anthony Fauci agreed with him.

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