On Tuesday afternoon D.C. went crazy after a White House reporter asked Press Secretary Jen Psaki if the Bidens planned to euthanize their dog Major, a three-year-old German shepherd rescue, after it barked at, bit, nipped and/or growled at a Secret Service agent.

Psaki said there was no serious injury, so I guess there were no puddles of blood in the Oval Office. But some in the press and on social media reacted with more vehemence than if the dog were a president who called the pandemic a hoax. It was almost as if Major were a member of the British royal family accusing someone of racism.

Meanwhile, in actual news, the rats are bailing the GOP’s sinking and rotting ship faster than you can say “stimulus check.”

Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri is the latest to let the world know he can’t stand what the GOP is doing and won’t have any more of it, declaring he won’t run for 2022 reelection. Yet Blunt remains too scared to call out his party for its nonsense—after all, he went along with it for the past four years. Donald Trump sent out a statement, since he can’t tweet anymore, praising Blunt for his service.

With its ongoing defections, the GOP is quickly becoming the party of whacked-out QAnon supporters who have more in common with conspiracy theorists on hallucinogens than anyone else in America. They attack President Joe Biden, his stimulus plan and the First Family’s dogs as if Biden were President Obama wearing a tan suit.

A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 70 percent of respondents support Biden’s latest stimulus package. GOP politicians including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley do not. Had the GOP maintained its dominance in the Senate, there is little doubt the stimulus bill never would’ve passed. Anyone who gets a stimulus check this spring should write a personal thank-you note to the voters in Georgia who elected not one but two Democrats, thus flipping the Senate and giving Democrats a working majority.

Black voters from Georgia came out in record numbers, saving the economy and possibly the Republic. As Winston Churchill said, “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.”

Some may consider it hyperbole to compare those who voted blue in Georgia to Spitfire pilots in the World War II Battle of Britain, but I think it may yet prove to be an understatement.

President Biden, as it turns out, read the tea leaves of U.S. sentiment better than the GOP, and better than most in the media. Too bad Biden’s communications team isn’t as good as he is; that department in particular continues to suffer self-inflicted wounds.

As alluded to above, there was some criticism Tuesday aimed at the press for asking a question about Biden’s dogs during the press secretary’s daily briefing. Some of that blame lands on the White House itself; it continues to limit the access of the press to pool reporters, many of whom are the youngest and least experienced of the journalists who cover the White House.

But the White House has more serious press problems. Tuesday, in a prime example of opaque transparency, Psaki refused to confirm specifics about the surging number of unaccompanied minors illegally crossing the southern U.S. border. The media have confirmed that in February alone more than 7,000 children crossed, yet Psaki wouldn’t put numbers to it, instead passing the buck to the Department of Homeland Security, which also won’t confirm numbers. Psaki is there to give the press answers, not to play hot potato with tough questions. Part of the reason she loathes putting statistics on the record is the fear it might make Biden look bad. She declined to call the border situation a crisis—a word the Biden White House has refrained from using but the Trump administration used almost as often as “fake news.”

The fact is, there is no current crisis on the border with Mexico. An actual crisis on the southern border did happen—in the late 1970s, after the collapse of Mexico’s oil economy and subsequent heavily devalued peso sent record numbers of undocumented workers across the border. That was a crisis. But the Biden White House is so fearful of the anti-immigrant Trump mob that it hides from actual facts. Trump created the crisis. Biden has defused it.

On Saturday, March 6, the White House sent a delegation to the southwestern border. A White House news release documented who went, when they went, why they went—but we weren’t told where they went. Since the United States shares a nearly 2,000-mile-long border with Mexico, it might be nice if we had more details about where the delegation went, beyond to the “southwest.”

Because the White House wouldn’t supply a location, some in the media began wondering, reasonably, what the president had to hide. What was really going on? Why would you send a team to the border and not elaborate? I was told that out of concern for the safety of a DHS facility the White House wouldn’t release the location its team visited. That sounds sketchy to a veteran border reporter, and sure enough by Monday, Psaki announced the location was in Carrizo Springs, Texas. I’ve been there many times. It’s got a Walmart. I wonder if Garzita’s is still open. Good restaurant.

Psaki conducts plenty of press briefings, but the White House has not yet held a presidential news conference with Biden himself, for which it has also received some grief. A question about that on Monday was met with Psaki snark. After confirming that Biden, who she said has done “about 40 Q&A’s since he took office,” was planning to hold a formal press briefing by the end of the month, she seemed to take offense when asked if that meant the briefing room would see more of Biden in general. “I don’t know that you’ll see him more than 40 times a month, but…I’m happy to ask him that question.”

As Psaki noted, Biden has made himself available for very short, easily controlled sessions with a small number of reporters on the South Lawn, copying Trump’s approach to “chopper talk.” He has also taken questions in the Oval Office, in the Diplomatic Room and in other places the press pool gathers. Psaki’s reasoning seems to be that these highly regulated, one- or two-question interactions between the president (who can step away if questions get tough) and some members of the press (who are shooed away when things get difficult) are a substitute for a full-blown news conference.

They are not. The heat the administration is getting for keeping Biden away from a press conference will disappear if he stands up, as promised, by the end of the month to take questions and supply real answers on a variety of subjects with more than just a handful of reporters in attendance.

Biden’s administration is doing itself a disservice. The president, as most Americans agree, is handling the pandemic well, and his stimulus package has been well received. So why does his communications team try to hide him?

Biden and his team do not wear halos. We should not bow and be lovingly thankful that they are better than the Trump team. Reporters from media outlets that are already in a mood for blood are going to act like sharks chasing chum in the water, especially when Biden’s team acts as if it doesn’t need to answer legitimate questions.

Should the presidential press be asking questions about euthanizing dogs? I firmly believe there is no such thing as a bad question. I remember reading about the time a reporter asked Betty Ford if her kids smoked weed. Everyone thought it was a bad question, until she said, “Yes.” So any question is fair game, and many Americans are interested in the president’s dogs, Major and Champ. (I still bring dog treats to the White House.) So let the dog questions continue. But there are more important questions to ask and more challenging issues to discuss. The administration’s current press protocols mean that won’t happen to the fullest extent possible. And Psaki, who isn’t part of Biden’s inner circle, is showing she really doesn’t want to (or cannot) handle the more difficult topics, let alone the larger number of reporters that should be in the room under normal circumstances.

The American public and the world at large deserve to know what the president is thinking, and not through the filter of a press secretary. Democratic strategist James Carville once told me that presidential spokespeople are there to “put the most faithful light” possible on the president. Press secretaries are not objective. “I represent the interests of those I work for,” Carville said. “People understand that. I don’t pretend to be an impartial observer. I’m not.”

The escapades of Donald Trump’s many White House press secretaries gave us all a wake-up call as to just how low one can go when defending a president. We expected more out of Psaki. We got your typical smiling bureaucrat who’s there to defend the president. Yes, that is a big step up from the propaganda swill spewed by the previous occupants of the White House.

But it isn’t good enough. Biden’s team is already taking hits from his own party. You can only hope the Democrats wake up before they implode like their GOP counterparts.

Or, you know, before the country goes to…the dogs. (I’m used to biting the hand that feeds me.)