The Secretary of Defense plays a game of hide-and-seek with the President of the United States

From The Morning Briefing: There's Useless, Then There's Lloyd Austin Useless by Stephen Kruiser.  Kruiser is too polemical for my taste but . . . he can be witty.  Lloyd Austin is Secretary of Defense and one of the few members of Biden's cabinet with any claim to competence.  There are plenty policies which he has pursued in terms of the Woke agenda with which I disagree but I do like his stance on Ukraine.  

There is a contretemps from the weekend when it appears that Austin went missing for a few days.  Missing as in he had some elective medical procedure which turned out to be more complicated than expected and took three or four days in an ICU.  Without the White House, the Joint Chiefs of Staff or his immediate subordinates being aware.  

There is a desire for privacy (which I respect) and then there is, well, this.  I don't have a good explanation for what happened or why, but it is clear that a key cabinet member, sixth in line of succession, and Secretary of perhaps the most important cabinet position, should not be AWOL.

Regardless, Washington being Washington, there is a lot being made of the incident.  Kruiser is actually pretty funny here.

As we were all trying to mentally and emotionally prepare ourselves for 2024, I wrote many times that this year is going to be a weird one. It appears that the nondescript entity in charge of annual weirdness levels thought that I was making a request. 

We're only a week in, and 2024 could already use some heavy sedation. 

There are a lot of strange things that I could have come up with in my rather fertile imagination that might set the tone for this year, but having the Secretary of Defense win a game of hide-and-seek with the President of the United States is out there even for me. 

Lately, whenever I emerge from my weekend news hiatus, it feels like the world is in prank mode. There's a lot of triple-checking to make sure that all of the news isn't merely AI-generated satire. When I first read the Lloyd Austin news I thought, "Come on, the Secretary of Defense can't just go AWOL." 

Later,

Donald Trump was taken to task a lot for the turmoil in his administration. Team Trump never misplaced an entire Cabinet member for four days though. That's a first for presidential administrations in the information era.

Heh.