Hamas terrorist attacks began on Israel early on Saturday morning, and it was clear this was a very coordinated, serious invasion on many fronts.
Israel immediately called it "war."
But as the hours ticked by through the morning, Joe Biden wasn't heard from. The first statement out of the White House was issued by NSC spokesperson Adrienne Watson, not Joe Biden.
The State Department also released this horrible statement, which they then had to delete.
Biden's statement didn't come out until just after 10 a.m. ET. Who knows if it was even written by him?
Biden didn't physically surface and make some live remarks until around 2:40 p.m. He took no questions from reporters, but accidentally revealed the big problem.
So, what they're saying is that they didn't bother to wake him up? He was just left to sleep, as it was all going down, as hour after hour it got worse?
He's saying he didn't start engaging on this until 7:30 or 8:00 a.m. Then, of course, he blew off any questions about an intelligence failure.
Remember when Hillary Clinton ran against Barack Obama, and talked about having experience and being the best to deal with the 3 a.m. phone call?
3 a.m.? With Benghazi, we saw that neither she nor Barack Obama could adequately respond to the call.
But, Biden couldn't even respond first thing in the morning. If he did start taking calls then, why wasn't the statement issued then? It wasn't issued until after 10 a.m. which is when he normally starts engaging on most days. Either he's not telling the truth, even about the phone calls, or he didn't have the sense to know that he should have put out a statement first thing.
This isn't the first time we've seen this problem with Joe Biden.
We saw in the case of the fall of Afghanistan, as it happened over another weekend vacation, we couldn't get a live statement out of Biden until he came back from the weekend. In fact, as I wrote at the time, things were already spiraling out of control before he left on vacation, and he went anyway.
We saw a similar response to the fires in Maui -- when he was on vacation at his beach home on yet another weekend vacation -- his response when interrupted about the disturbing death count was he had "no comment," and he smirked. He couldn't be bothered to offer a comment until he got around to it and came back from vacation.
We're going to see this more and more because he simply isn't up to meeting the task. It's one more, screaming reason why he cannot win in 2024 if we are to survive. And the next one may be a big one -- Taiwan is next on the list.